Film · 1993 · Films · 1990s
What's Eating Gilbert Grape
Scored from 293 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1990s (4,082 peers).
Summary
In the shrinking town of Endora, Iowa, Gilbert Grape clerks at a family grocery losing its customers to a new supermarket and holds his household together. His mother has not left the house since her husband's suicide and is now confined by her weight, and his brother Arnie, who has an intellectual disability, is approaching an eighteenth birthday doctors said he would never see. Gilbert's routine of caretaking and an affair with a local housewife is disturbed when Becky, stranded in town after her grandmother's trailer breaks down, takes an interest in him. Lasse Hallström's drama, adapted from Peter Hedges' novel, weighs what Gilbert owes his family against what he wants for himself.
Released in 1993, What's Eating Gilbert Grape is a drama film. It was made in the United States. It runs 1h 58m. It is rated PG-13.
293 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 315 reviewers with at least two reviews each feeds the raw-average track. 4,081 other films from the 1990s form the cohort it is ranked inside.
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 What's Eating Gilbert Grape 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 293.
Cohort: Films · 1990s
