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.

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.

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.

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.

I thought we were using gigaflops… oh, OK.

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...

Interesting from the perspective of tech startups.