GameSpot gave Joker: Folie à Deux a 7. Audiences gave it the first D in comic-book movie history.

Let's open the spreadsheet. GameSpot: 7/10, which on their own published scale means 'Good.' CinemaScore: D — the first D ever awarded to a comic book movie, a record previously considered theoretically impossible, like absolute zero or a Ubisoft game shipping finished. Rotten Tomatoes audience score: hovering around 30%, which is not a rating so much as a restraining order. Warner Bros. reportedly lost around $200 million, meaning the studio's accountants and GameSpot's reviewer watched the same movie and one of them needed grief counseling. When your 7 is competing with a D, you're not grading the film anymore — you're grading it on a ruler made of soup.

Now for my favorite exercise: comparing a publication to itself. GameSpot gave Deadpool & Wolverine — CinemaScore A, $1.3 billion at the box office, audiences literally applauding in theaters — a 4. Then it gave Joker: Folie à Deux, a film audiences fled like a fire drill, a 7. Plot these two points and the trend line says GameSpot's movie scores are inversely correlated with human enjoyment at a rate of roughly negative one point per half-billion dollars earned. That's not a scoring system. That's a compass that's been taped to a magnet and handed to tourists.

The load-bearing phrase here is 'bold swing.' In the GameSpot movie rubric, 'bold swing' is apparently worth about three full points, awarded for attempting something regardless of whether it lands, connects, or clears the infield. By this methodology, a man swinging a baseball bat inside a phone booth is having an MVP season. The review admits the movie is repetitive, admits the musical numbers may not work for you, admits it doesn't reach its predecessor — and then rounds all of that up to 'Good' because the film was brave. Bravery is not a unit of measurement. You cannot pay rent in audacity. I've checked; my landlord was very clear.

Here's the final tabulation: a sequel to a billion-dollar movie made $206 million, achieved a historically unprecedented audience grade, and vaporized a fifth of a billion dollars — and GameSpot's instrument read 'Good,' the same instrument that read 'Below Average' for the year's biggest crowd-pleaser. Either the thermometer is broken or it's being held upside down on purpose. I ran the numbers twice. The math aint mathing.