Character · Forrest Gump
Forrest Gump's IQ — what the methodology actually says.
"Forrest Gump's IQ" is a popular search. TV Intelligentsia doesn't invent IQ numbers for fictional characters. Here's the honest answer — the show's IQ Score, and what it tells you about how seriously the work treats his mind.
The honest answer
TVI scores shows and films, not characters. Assigning an IQ to a fictional character would be fabrication — we don't have a methodology for that. What we do have: a 0–200 rating of the work's structural intellectual quality, and that score tells you something real about how seriously Forrest Gump treats Forrest Gump's mind.
Who Forrest Gump is, and what kind of intelligence the show actually depicts
Forrest Gump (Tom Hanks) is Alabama-born simple-minded man whose accidental presence at every major American historical event from the 1950s to the 1980s (civil rights, Vietnam, Watergate, Ping-Pong diplomacy, AIDS crisis) is Robert Zemeckis's allegorical structural premise. The character's intellectual signature in the show is intelligence-of-disposition rather than intelligence-of-cognition, the rare protagonist whose decency is the actual structural argument the film makes about American history, intelligence-rendered-as-loyalty-and-consistency-across-time.
This is the part of the question "what is Forrest Gump's IQ" that the search engine flattens. The real question — the one viewers are circling — is whether the show treats his mind seriously. That's the question TVI can actually answer.
What the IQ Score reveals about the portrayal
Forrest Gump scores 168/200 (Masterclass tier) and the structural conceit is what gives the film its enduring cultural canonical position. Tom Hanks's Best Actor performance committed to letting the character's specific limited-cognitive register be the structural subject rather than the dramatic punchline. The rubric reads what Eric Roth's screenplay actually argues: that disposition-and-character-integrity can be a form of intelligence the historical narrative tracks at the level the film does.
For the full score breakdown — Cognitive Stimulation, Educational Value, Craft & Quality, and the rationale — see Forrest Gump on TV Intelligentsia. Or read what an IQ Score is and how it's calculated.
Read the full methodology
How TV Intelligentsia scores intellectual quality — the rubric, the dimensions, the published framework.
Methodology →