[stinkytaco]

Rotten Tomatoes is good and predicting a movie I (or others) like, but not really at "ranking". Zootopia, one of their top movies of 2016 and a 98% rating, is a good movie, but one I'm unlikely to pursue again. The Godfather (with a 99%) rating, is a movie I will pick up on Blu Ray and revisit many times. It's far more than 1% better than Zootopia.

So RT is good at predicting "should I watch this movie I haven't watched before", but bad at predicting more sophisticated habits or preferences. I wouldn't buy the Blu Ray off a RT prediction, but I would rent.

So it becomes a question of what are you trying to accomplish? For some issues up/down is a good way to solve a problem, for others it isn't.

[icebraining]

Rotten Tomatoes actually has both ratings, meaning they recognize the limitation you're referring to. In the other, Zootopia has 8.1/10 and The Godfather has 9.2/10, showing that difference in quality.

[Houshalter]

Also you just aren't the demographic for zootopia. If you have kids then it probably is worth buying and they will watch it many times. There are so many genres of films, it's best to compare within a single genre and not between.

[BoiledCabbage]

> Rotten Tomatoes is good and predicting a movie I (or others) like, but not really at "ranking". Zootopia, one of their top movies of 2016 and a 98% rating, is a good movie, but one I'm unlikely to pursue again

It feels like you're mixing together two different arguments. Rotten Tomatoes is good at predicting whether someone will like a movie. What is "ranking"? That is a very undefined concept. Ranking of what? It's clearly not ranking of likelyhood of a person liking a movie because rotten tomatoes already does that.

Later you mention likelihood of repeat watchings of a movie. Rotten Tomatoes thumbs up or down based on whether someone liked a movie, as a result it produces a metric on likelihood of someone liking of movie. Instead if rotten tomatoes immediately after watching a movie, asking "Did you like this movie?", asked "Would you watch this movie again?" then it would produce an indicator of re-watchability.

Up/down doesn't matter - it's the question that's being asked.

note the caveat RT obviously doesn't actually ask critics these questions, they read and judge their reviews and interpret them as answering those questions.