Film · 1974 · Films · 1970s
The Towering Inferno
Scored from 234 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1970s (2,406 peers).
Summary
At the gala opening of the world's tallest skyscraper in San Francisco, an electrical fire ignites on a high floor due to substandard wiring and rapidly spreads through the building, trapping hundreds of VIPs at a penthouse party. The architect and the fire chief must work together to rescue the guests as the inferno climbs upward and conventional firefighting tactics fail.
The Towering Inferno (1974) is a film IMDb files under the action, drama and thriller genres.
The calibrated figure is built from 234 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 241 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead. Its in-cohort standing is measured against the other 2,405 1970s films, not against the whole corpus.
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 Towering Inferno 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 · 1970s (2,406 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 234.
Cohort: Films · 1970s
