Why would I care about rewatchability? The torrents are full with thousands of lives on video I'll never watch, what's the point of rewatching anything but the dearest, youth-defining films?
Speaking as a film buff; this is actually quite a good guide to the sort of movie it is (when combined with quality). If lots of people mark it good quality, but wouldn't watch it again, that implies that you have to be in the right mood for it.
If people mark rewatchability high, even if the quality rating varies, you know it is much more easy going film.
The comment I was replying to said This would be no different than having two histograms side by side. And I pointed out that it is not.
Oh well I'll answer your question anyway. Because 90% of everything is crap (probably more than that on P2P sites). Re-watching a movie can be like walking in the same park more than once, looking at pleasant things with a sense of recognition. You could put a movie in to suit your mood. Sometimes you'd rather watch a good "original" movie again than watch yet another crappy remake or rip-off.
rewatchability should indicate a light-weight movie.
If you want that, you look at rewatchability, if you want something more complex, you use quality.
I think this is the underlying assumption.
Because the rewatchability rating doesn't just tell you how rewatchable a movie is, but also how good and "timeless" it is, i.e mainly how deeply it resonates with people.
This is not about picking a movie to watch again after you have already seen it once: this is about picking a movie you haven't seen but that is so good that other people like to watch it again and again.
You're telling me its stupid to choose the 100% chance of some known amount of fun rewatching an old series than to bet compared to watching that latest Jennifer Aniston flick?
You are not trying to gauge if you would want to re-watch the film. If other would re-watch the film, maybe, just maybe, you would enjoy watching it the first time.
Because "rewatchability" is not just useful to judge how much people like to watch a movie again -- it's also useful to judge how much people like the movie, find it deep, and connect with it (over pure mindless fun).
So rewatchability roughly translates to "emotional connection + quality".
Now compare your point of view with the one expressed by mhellmic[1] in this very discussion. 'Rewatchability' sounded to me as something even more vague than 'quality' while reading the article. Also, my pattern for rewatching films differs greatly from both your description for rewatchability and mhellmic's, and from my own pattern for rereading books. I don't see how it can be applied to rating systems with just one additional parameter (the quality thing).
