

How To Make A Megaflop (3 simple rules to ensure humiliating failure) - cecileb
http://www.economist.com/node/21551455

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z92
Bad article. "Slaughtering a sacred cow" and "mixing oil and water" both can
be formula for great movies. Which leaves us, not surprisingly, the third
reason "produce a genuinely awful product" as the lone one.

On a side note, I think not having a wow moment is one recipe toward movie
disaster. The other one might be: not being able to stir up emotions of the
viewers.

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droithomme
Strange article. Uses John Carter as an example, then none of the "3 simple
rules" are applied to it. Nor is it mentioned the reality: the film is good,
but was very badly marketed.

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olavk
Totally missing the point with The Producers. In the movie the "Springtime for
Hitler" play becomes an (unplanned) success. And the movie itself became a
success, showing that you can indeed "mix oil with water" with enough
audacity. The article presents it like it is obvious that Hamlet or Lolita
will never work as a musical - presumably because the material is too serious
for showtunes - but Jesus Christ Superstar was a huge success.

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DanBC
The Economist (at least, the UK version) is great, but the opinion pieces are
often the weakest bits.

> _But the existence of flops such as “John Carter” is perverse proof that the
> Walt Disney Company is doing something right._

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tambourine_man
I thought we were using gigaflops… oh, OK.

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Amadiro
I was also staring at the title for half a minute, puzzled as to what's the
deal about failing to designing a CPU with a megaflop...

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niccolop
Interesting from the perspective of tech startups.

