Why Game Of Thrones Kept Cutting Direwolf Scenes at the Last Minute
The world of Game of Thrones was a quasi-medieval land, mostly filled with mundane things, like politics, court intrigue, and fights between your normal medieval humans.
But it also, from the very beginning, had its fantasy elements. Like the Stark direwolves: six oversized canines, sent to be companions and guardians for Lord Eddard Stark five trueborn children and one foster son, by a mysterious force (perhaps Three-Eyed Raven, perhaps someone or something even beyond him).
They've started as adorable puppies in Season 1, but soon grew into huge, fearsome wolves, each magically synced with the mind of his or her owner.
The only problem was, for those who loved them, direwolves did not appear on screen that much, with a number of scenes, featuring direwolves, cut out of the series at the last minute.
Why that happened?
Well, as you can guess, due to the traditional bane of all things fantastical: the limited budget. Game of Thrones only could boast inordinately lavish funding in its later seasons, while direwolves appeared early on – and there were many other things to spend the money on, including costumes and sets, and when funding increased, so did demand for money, because the series now involved dragons and undead armies, and great battles.
Direwolves in the books were supposed to be more intelligent than any mundane animal, and taking actions too difficult to film with a normal dog – but making wholly CG creatures to play a bigger role would have been beyond the series' means. Even as is, CGI and post-production editing for scenes involving direwolves remained too expensive sometimes.
So, instead of more such scenes we got tweets, apologizing for those scenes not making the cut.
In some cases, direwolf-related budgetary and CGI issues even resulted in characters acting, well, out of character, as when Jon asked Tormund to take Ghost with him in Season 8, Episode 4, clearly just to write Ghost out of the final episodes' plot. And then Jon simply walked away from his loyal companion without patting him or as much as saying goodbye.
The episode's director, David Nutter, later confirmed that such odd framing of this scene was caused by budget considerations. "Since the direwolves are kind of CG creations, we felt it best to keep it as simple as possible," he revealed to Vox. "And I think that it played out much more powerfully that way."
But that did not calm down the direwolf fans.