Film · 1988 · Films · 1980s
They Live
Scored from 453 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1980s (3,141 peers).
Summary
A drifter wandering Los Angeles in search of work stumbles upon a pair of special sunglasses that reveal a hidden reality: subliminal messages saturate the media and a ruling class of disguised aliens is quietly controlling humanity through consumerism and conformity. Teaming up with a reluctant ally, he joins a small underground resistance trying to expose the truth and dismantle the signal keeping everyone asleep.
They Live is a 1988 action, horror and science-fiction film.
453 IMDb reviewers rate with enough spread for a personal baseline to be measured, and those are the ones the calibrated score reads; a separate, broader pool of 465 reviewers with at least two reviews each feeds the raw-average track. A second review pool sits behind it as well: 2,970 Rotten Tomatoes reviewers clear the same calibration test, and Rankquant scores them separately. Its in-cohort standing is measured against the other 3,140 1980s 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 They Live 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 · 1980s (3,141 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 453.
Cohort: Films · 1980s
