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Very frequently I've heard the question "is this a good movie?" and the response is "what does the RT score say?" Many online stores include the RT score inline when you buy a movie too.

This avenue doesn't immediately distinguish whether a movie is a blockbuster or indie or how much money it made. But then again, some people do read movie descriptions thoroughly...

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Commercial success and quality ("good movie") are obviously very different things. Critics care about the latter. Quality is hard to quantify, but that's no excuse to take such a poor proxy as sales. If you want to test whether Rotten Tomato scores are meaningful, I say you'd have to test whether they are meaningful to a particular individual with particular tastes; i.e., test the correlation of someone's judgments against a critic's.

[edit: Read the article again, deleted previous response, sorry]

So you think box office is a better correlate of 'good movie' than RT score? I didn't get that from the post, but if that's what you're saying, then yes, I concede you have shown that correlation is not valid.

Maybe not better, but more important.

I'll update the post with a footnote tomorrow clarifying things.

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