Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves Almost Featured More Non-Traditional NPCs (Exclusive)

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.'"

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.