Film · 1972 · Films · 1970s
What's Up, Doc?
Scored from 162 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1970s (2,406 peers).
Summary
Howard Bannister, a strait-laced musicologist who studies the tonal properties of igneous rocks, arrives in San Francisco with his domineering fiancee Eunice to compete for a research grant. At the Hotel Bristol he is adopted, entirely against his will, by Judy Maxwell, a serial college dropout with a gift for demolishing whatever she touches. Four identical plaid overnight cases circulate among the guests: one holds Howard's rocks, one Judy's clothes, one a dowager's jewels and one a set of stolen government documents, drawing thieves, spies and hotel detectives into the confusion. Peter Bogdanovich's screwball comedy, patterned on Howard Hawks's Bringing Up Baby, builds toward an extended chase through the streets of San Francisco.
Released in 1972, What's Up, Doc? is a comedy and romance film. Inside comedy it is classed as Goofy. It runs 1h 34m and carries a G certificate. Its country of origin is listed as the United States.
The calibrated figure is built from 162 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 165 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead. 2,405 other films from the 1970s 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 Up, Doc? 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 · 1970s (2,406 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 162.
Cohort: Films · 1970s
