Film · 2005 · Films · 2000s
War of the Worlds
Scored from 1,980 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2000s (7,847 peers).
Summary
A divorced New Jersey dockworker is thrust into a desperate fight for survival when towering alien tripods erupt from beneath the earth and begin annihilating humanity. Trying to reunite his young daughter with her mother in Boston, he flees across a collapsing American landscape as the machines harvest people and lay waste to cities. Steven Spielberg's adaptation of H.G. Wells reframes the invasion as a ground-level family ordeal.
War of the Worlds (2005) is a film IMDb files under the action, adventure and science-fiction genres.
The cohort it is ranked inside is 2000s films — 7,847 of them. 1,980 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 2,083 reviewers with at least two reviews each feeds the raw-average track.
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 War of the Worlds 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 1,980.
Cohort: Films · 2000s
