Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves almost featured several other non-traditional races in the movie. Speaking with ComicBook.com earlier this week, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves revealed that the movie almost featured a grippli and a tortle in different scenes. The grippli was originally in Xenk’s introductory scene where the paladin (played by Regé-Jean Page) pulls a tabaxi child out of a large fish’s mouth. “In the script we had originally had a grippli, which is this type of frog person, and we couldn’t afford it,” Latcham explained. “We just did not have the money to spend on a grippli puppet from Legacy, which was going to be probably $100,000, for literally a one-line joke that seemed silly at best. Because Xenk just walks up and says, ‘Jenkli, my boy.’ And he says, ‘Jenkli to you, good sir.’”
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The cost of practical animations were just too high to justify for one scene, Latcham explained, so the character was swapped out with a dragonborn, a creature that already had animatronics made for it due to appearing elsewhere in the film.
Latcham also mentioned another cut scene involving a tortle, who was supposed to appear early in the film. “We had another gag with a tortle that we wanted to do,” Latcham said. “When they steal the horses at the beginning of the film, we wanted a tortle to slowly chase them at very, very slow pace for a very long time. And it was probably going to get cut anyways, because it was such a silly joke. We’re trying to build momentum in the movie, and now there’s like this slow motion tortle chase. It just seemed absurd. And I don’t know that tortles ride horses. So it all just seemed a bit silly. But that was mostly cut for budget.”
The movie does feature plenty of other Dungeons & Dragons monsters and creatures, ranging from the fearsome Themberchaud to displacer beasts and rust monsters. And assuming that there’s a sequel, there will always be room for more monsters in the next Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves movie.
Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is in theaters now.
