Film · 1998 · Films · 1990s
Waking Ned Devine
Scored from 149 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1990s (4,082 peers).
Summary
In a tiny Irish village, two lifelong friends discover that a local man has won the national lottery but died of shock clutching the winning ticket. Determined not to let the fortune slip away, they hatch a scheme to convince the visiting lottery official that the deceased is still alive, drawing the entire community into the gentle conspiracy.
Released in 1998, Waking Ned Devine is a comedy film. Inside comedy it is classed as Dark Comedy.
The calibrated figure is built from 149 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 158 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead. 4,081 other films from the 1990s form the cohort it is ranked inside. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 1,089 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 Waking Ned Devine 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 149.
Cohort: Films · 1990s
