Near the end of your Intertitle Wrapped, after the statistics and the director counts and the decade breakdown, there's a moment that tends to either confirm something you suspected or genuinely surprise you. The Rarity Score. A single line that says something like: your typical pick has around X votes — and most of the catalog is louder than you.
If you've spent years quietly logging Romanian New Wave films and Japanese pinku eiga and obscure Italian genre pictures that never found an English distributor, the number might not shock you. If you assumed your taste was fairly mainstream because you watch contemporary releases, it might. Either way, the number is doing something specific. It's worth understanding what, and what it isn't.
What the Rarity Score actually measures
The score is an obscurity percentile. Not a subjective judgment about your taste's sophistication or seriousness — a measurement of where your watched films sit on the popularity curve of the catalog.
The system takes every film you've logged that has vote data, computes a geometric mean of their TMDB vote counts, and then finds where that figure falls in the distribution of the enriched catalog. The geometric mean is a deliberate choice: it's less distorted by outliers than a simple average, so one Titanic in an otherwise marginal log doesn't pull your score dramatically toward mainstream. The final number answers a narrow question — what share of the catalog has a louder popular profile than your typical watch?
"Top 5%" in the post title is an illustrative figure for what a Rarity result can look like. If yours shows something like that, it means roughly 95% of the catalog has higher vote counts than your typical pick. The catalog is noisy and the percentile is directional, not a clinical rank. But it's grounded in real signal: actual vote counts, not a curated list of what counts as obscure.
Where it shows up in Wrapped
The Rarity Score is part of the taste-DNA section of your Wrapped experience — the page that synthesizes your archetype, your rarity tier, and a cover headline into something shareable. Your archetype tells you how you watch (see the full taxonomy of taste archetypes); rarity tells you where your watching sits relative to what most people have seen.
The score feeds a tiered label: somewhere on a spectrum from monument (very high vote counts, crowded popular territory) through mainstream, cinephile, and obscure, down to hidden (the films with almost no votes on TMDB). The label is paired with a one-liner about your typical pick — written with a leading "~" to keep the framing honest about its precision: it's an approximate figure, not a clinical count.
The honest limits
This is where it matters to be specific about what the score can and can't do.
It requires enough signal to mean anything. Wrapped itself is designed for accounts with at least twenty logged films — below that threshold, the statistics don't have enough to work with. Rarity has an additional requirement on top of that: the films in your log need to have enriched catalog data, which means TMDB vote counts. Films without that data don't factor into the geometric mean at all. If your log is heavily weighted toward films the catalog hasn't enriched yet, the score may reflect only a slice of your watching.
When fewer than five of your logged films have vote data, the percentile is suppressed entirely. The system will show your tier label — something like obscure or cinephile — but won't display a specific number, because a number derived from four or fewer films would be statistically meaningless. The label is the most it can honestly say.
And even when the score is fully computed, it's directional, not a precise rank. The catalog's vote-count distribution shifts as films get enriched and new entries are added. A score of "87th percentile" isn't a fixed position in a definitive hierarchy — it's a reading of where you sat at the time the calculation ran, against the catalog as it existed then.
"Rare" is relative to catalog coverage, not to all cinema. The catalog doesn't contain every film ever made. It contains a large body of films — weighted, like most English-language film databases, toward titles with enough critical or popular footprint to have been catalogued and enriched. A film that's genuinely obscure in the broader sense may simply not appear, which means it doesn't pull your score anywhere. Conversely, a film that's well-documented in the catalog but genuinely little-watched will register as low-vote. The score is a reasonable proxy for taste obscurity within the catalog's scope. It's not a claim about the full history of world cinema.
No score is better than a suppressed score. If your Rarity result doesn't show a percentile — if it only shows a tier, or if rarity doesn't appear in your Wrapped at all — that's not a failure mode. It means the system didn't have enough enriched data on your watched films to make a confident statement. The honest response is silence, not a fabricated position. The score only fires when it has something real to say.
Why obscure isn't a virtue ranking
There's a version of the Rarity Score that reads as a status signal — a way of proving your taste is more discerning, more adventurous, more serious than whoever is watching Top Gun: Maverick in the mainstream tier. That reading is wrong, and it's worth naming directly.
The score measures where your watching sits on the vote-count distribution. It doesn't measure whether you've watched more important films, or made more cinematically useful choices, or have better judgment about what's worth two hours of attention. A mainstream score might reflect a deep commitment to Hollywood classicism from the studio era, or a serious engagement with contemporary prestige cinema. An obscure score might reflect genuine discovery, or it might reflect geography and access — what was available in the streaming libraries you had, what got recommended in your corner of the internet. The map from vote counts to taste quality is much less direct than the score sometimes implies in how people talk about it.
The more interesting question isn't how rare is my taste? but what does it reveal about how I actually watch? The score is one dimension of that. Your taste map on the discover page gives you the spatial version — where your embedding sits relative to the broader catalog, which is a richer picture of your watching than a single percentile. And your archetype names the pattern: whether you're watching across the full history of the form, or drilling deep into a director's filmography, or logging what most people never find.
Rarity is one number. It's a real one, when the data is there. But it's the conversation it starts, not the verdict it delivers.