>It's much quicker and easier to just get an aggregated Metascore... I don't have any desire to read 12 movie review articles
So your argument against a broad-sample aggregator (RT) is to use a slightly-less-broad-sample aggregator (MC)? You complain about "every-person-with-a-substack" but you're still relying on an aggregation of dozens of critics you've never heard of. You're just drawing an arbitrary line in the sand and calling it "quality."
>"High score" is an arbitrary definition. For the purposes of the discussion... 74 doesn't cross the threshold of worth watching
You're confusing your personal, subjective viewing threshold with an objective measure of quality. A score is what it is. 75/100 is the top quartile. That is, by definition, a high score. Whether you have enough time in your life to watch every movie in the top quartile is completely irrelevant to the validity of the score itself.
Now this is more besides the point but i really do think that you're using a tool (Metacritic's average score) for a job it wasn't designed for: being the sole arbiter of what's worth your time. A film's "quality" is not a single, objective number. It depends on genre, intent, and audience.
Is a 95-rated historical epic 'better' than the 'best' horror film of the year that only managed an 82 on Metacritic? Your system says yes, which is absurd. They're trying to do different things.
Not to mention your method is overly biased towards one specific type of film: the prestige drama. If that's the only kind of film you like to watch then cool i guess, but if not then what you're currently doing is nonsensical.
>As yet another example "Bob Trevino likes it" is 94 RT vs 70 MC compared with "Past Lives" 95 RT vs MC 94: Which is more informative when selecting a movie? I can list more examples but I can't find any examples that demonstrate the reverse (i.e. that shows that you would be better off listening to RT over MC).
Even the most well received movies have a few mixed, negative or less positive than the consensus reviews. You could well be one of them. So the RT score tries to answers the question..."What are the odds i'll like this movie?"
This is a very useful information to have especially because i'm not a zombie picking movies to watch because of a single average score from an echo chamber of critics (which is bizarrely what you seem to be doing).
If the synopsis of Bob Trevino is more interesting to me, I would absolutely pick it over Past Lives especially if the latter seems more divisive.
They are complementary scores. Only when two movies seem to be the same type of film with the same type of distribution of scores will i favor the average score.