Film · 1997 · Films · 1990s
Wag the Dog
Scored from 184 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1990s (4,082 peers).
Summary
Days before a presidential election, a sex scandal threatens the incumbent's reelection. A shadowy spin doctor teams up with a Hollywood producer to fabricate a fake war with Albania, staging patriotic footage and a phony war hero to distract the media and voters long enough for the president to win.
Released in 1997, Wag the Dog is a comedy and drama film. Inside comedy it is classed as Satire.
Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 1,427 of whom clear the calibration test. 4,081 other films from the 1990s form the cohort it is ranked inside. The calibrated figure is built from 184 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 187 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead.
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 Wag the Dog 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 · 1990s (4,082 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 184.
Cohort: Films · 1990s
