Film · 2008 · Films · 2000s
The Wrestler
Scored from 570 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2000s (7,847 peers).
Summary
Randy 'The Ram' Robinson headlined professional wrestling cards in the late 1980s and now lives in a New Jersey trailer park, taking shifts at a supermarket and bookings in VFW halls and school gymnasiums. After a hardcore match and the heart attack that follows it, a doctor tells him his body cannot take another bout, and he tries to assemble a life outside the ring: more hours at the store, a courtship of Cassidy, a stripper also aging out of her work, and contact with his estranged daughter Stephanie. A twentieth-anniversary rematch with his old opponent The Ayatollah is on the table at the same time. Darren Aronofsky's drama stars Mickey Rourke, with Marisa Tomei and Evan Rachel Wood, shot handheld on the independent wrestling circuit.
The Wrestler is a 2008 drama and sport film. Its country of origin is listed as the United States. Its certificate is R. It runs 1h 49m.
The calibrated figure is built from 570 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 586 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead. The cohort it is ranked inside is 2000s films — 7,847 of them. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 13,490 of whom clear the calibration test.
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 Wrestler 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 · 2000s (7,847 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 570.
Cohort: Films · 2000s
