Film · 2024 · Films · 2020s
The Substance
Scored from 2,048 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2020s (7,930 peers).
Summary
A fading celebrity fitness star, dropped from her TV show after turning 50, takes a black-market drug that generates a younger, 'better' version of herself. The two share one body on a strict weekly switch, but when the younger self breaks the rules to hold on to fame, the arrangement collapses into a grotesque body-horror reckoning.
The Substance (2024) is a film IMDb files under the drama, horror and science-fiction genres.
The calibrated figure is built from 2,048 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 2,128 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 1,811 of whom clear the calibration test. The cohort it is ranked inside is 2020s films — 7,930 of them.
How the score was built
We compare the reviewers of this title against every other title those same people reviewed. Each review is scored relative to the reviewer's own baseline — a 7/10 from a hard grader sits well above their average, while a 7/10 from a generous grader sits below theirs. Every reviewer then counts the same, so the result is a calibrated consensus rather than a raw average.
- Global percentile
- Where The Substance lands against every title we rank.
- In-cohort percentile
- The same comparison narrowed to its cohort — titles of the same format released in the same decade. A 1970s film is judged against 1970s films, not against last year's streaming series. Ranked against Films · 2020s (7,930 titles).
- AI-adjusted percentile
- The same reviewer-normalized score, corrected for how much confidence the sample supports: thin samples are pulled toward the corpus average. Each title keeps the share n / (n + 53) of its measured distance from the average, where n is its calibrated-reviewer count, and the result is ranked on the same scale as the global percentile.53 is the median sample size across everything we rank. Here n is 2,048.
Cohort: Films · 2020s
