Comparing the MCU with The Horus Heresy

This Blog Post was originally published on the platform "writelier" (formerly "co-writers" and "200wordsaday"). Sadly the blogging platform was discontinued. I downloaded all my blog posts and prepared them to be republish them here.

At first, yes I know they probably aren't comparable. The Marvel Cinematic Universe is a large Movie Series based on Comics. The Horus Heresy could be a large Movie Series based on the Books published by Games Workshop.

Why am I comparing them then? Well, I was chatting with a coworker today how interesting it would be if The Horus Heresy book series that takes place in Warhammer 40k would be published as full movies.

Besides that it probably will never happen, I took some average values of the MCU movies and calculated the numbers for the Horus Heresy.

At first a few things, so you know how I came to those numbers. To get a movie length for the Horus Heresy movies, I dived the average book page count through the average minutes of an MCU movie. Resulting in 3,25 Pages per Minute.

With that, I was able to calculate a theoretical runtime per Movie per Book. And with the average cost per Minute and average revenue per Minute from the MCU movies, I calculated the theoretical costs of a Horus Heresy Movie Series.

Also, I only took the first 23 books of the Horus Heresy, as only 23 movies in the MCU are published.

Interestingly, the Horus Heresy books seem to be shorter than the average MCU movie. In total the Horus Heresy movies would be about 70 minutes longer.

In total the first 23 Horus Heresy books would be about 140 million dollars cheaper than their MCU pendant. But they would also make about 1,1 billion dollars less profit.

You can view the full spreadsheet here.

Now we need just somebody that has 5 billion dollars spare and wants to finance the movies. :)

Probably not the expected 365-day post you expected, but it is the only you get. :)