Film · 2018 · Films · 2010s
Whitney
Scored from 45 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2010s (13,059 peers).
Summary
Kevin Macdonald's documentary traces Whitney Houston from her Newark childhood and the New Hope Baptist Church choir, where her mother Cissy directed, through Clive Davis's packaging of her as a crossover pop star, to the stadium years, her marriage to Bobby Brown and the drug use that shadowed both. Made with the cooperation of her estate, it is built from home video, unreleased recordings, tour and rehearsal footage, and on-camera interviews with her brothers, her ex-husband, her assistants and the executives around her. Late in the film her brother and a longtime assistant allege that she was sexually abused as a child by a relative, and the rest of the family is asked to answer for it.
Whitney is a 2018 biography, documentary and drama film. It is rated PG-13. The runtime is 127 minutes. It was made in the United States.
Only 45 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 48 reviewers with at least two reviews feeds the raw-average track. The cohort it is ranked inside is 2010s films — 13,059 of them. A second review pool sits behind it as well: 51 Rotten Tomatoes reviewers clear the same calibration test, and Rankquant scores them separately.
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 Whitney 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 · 2010s (13,059 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 45.
Cohort: Films · 2010s
