Film · 1996 · Films · 1990s
When We Were Kings
Scored from 56 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1990s (4,082 peers).
Summary
Leon Gast's documentary is built from footage he shot in Kinshasa in 1974, when promoter Don King staged the Rumble in the Jungle, the heavyweight title fight between champion George Foreman and the 32-year-old challenger Muhammad Ali, together with a three-day music festival featuring James Brown, B.B. King and Miriam Makeba. A cut over Foreman's eye in sparring pushes the bout back more than a month, stranding both camps in Mobutu Sese Seko's Zaire while Ali courts the Congolese crowds and taunts Foreman for the cameras. Interviews recorded two decades later with Norman Mailer, George Plimpton and Spike Lee frame the long build-up and the night itself.
When We Were Kings (1996) is a film IMDb files under the documentary and sport genres. It is rated PG. It was made in the United States. The runtime is 87 minutes.
Its in-cohort standing is measured against the other 4,081 1990s films, not against the whole corpus. A second review pool sits behind it as well: 410 Rotten Tomatoes reviewers clear the same calibration test, and Rankquant scores them separately. Only 56 of its IMDb reviewers rate with enough spread for a personal baseline to be measured, so the calibrated figure rests on a thin sample; a broader pool of 59 reviewers with at least two reviews 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 When We Were Kings 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 56.
Cohort: Films · 1990s
