Right now I am just scraping the IMDB and RT public-facing pages -- there is an API for both, but they're both behind some sort of weirdness that I don't feel like dealing with. (Side note when did the internet get so frickin weird? I expected IMDB to be, IDK, open. Hey look -- "Since 1998, it has been owned and operated by IMDb.com, Inc., a subsidiary of Amazon" dude fuck the modern internet this is a bunch of crap)
Anyway
Be that as it may, I think just to have something that fires up once a week, figures out release schedules and schedules posts for the coming week, and then if something weird happens and it breaks because it's based on HTML parsing crap, then it won't be a huge inconvenience to fix it. That would be my feeling. Unless you know of a better place to grab the data from?
And yeah different release schedules for different countries is an issue, they're pretty different sometimes and making it just be US-centric doesn't sound like the way. I hadn't really gotten to tackling any of that because I didn't know what to do... but now thinking about it, here's what I think:
There's a weekly "upcoming releases" post. A place to start for that could be having a list of everything coming out for the coming week or two for each of a few major regions. So you can skip to your region and see what's going on. Then, for each release, it has a link to the most recent comments thread relating to each movie, and a link to the RT page and what the RT rating is.
If there's a movie that's coming out that doesn't yet have a thread discussing it, and it's above a certain score threshold on RT, then it makes one. That way there's always some kind of thread that it can link back to.
Side note, apparently RT is saying there's a "Run Lola Run" theatrical re-release coming soon, but the current design wouldn't post it, because it's not listed on IMDB with a release date. I wasn't planning on addressing that for any kind of first cut but if that kind of thing happens often it might be worth addressing in some fashion; that's honestly more interesting to me than most of the actual new releases this month.