Because this looks to be a movie where the wolves take back the forest. For too long now, between National Geographic and its ilk, and fantasy fiction, wolves have gotten a makeover as heroic and cool symbols of nature. You’ve got Hopper in WoT, the Starks’ pets in aSoI&F, and numerous other analogs. Meanwhile, you go back and look at the old-time fantasy like Conan the Barbarian or Tolkien, and they are just carrying on the time-honored view of wolves as scary near-monsters. Like the way they are in fairy tales or mythology or Jack London or the Bible. While vampire stories might be evolving and taking on a lot of different aspects, at its heart, the werewolf story is a murder mystery. In other words, to represent the killer that lurks beneath the familiar façade of a nice normal character, we use the wolf. And speaking of supernatural monsters, long before they glued the first hair onto Lon Cheney Jr’s face, Stoker’s Dracula had wolf minions and transformed into one, even if the bats get all the press. “The children of the night, what beautiful music they make,” one of his most memorable creepy lines, was a reference to wolves howling, and to people who had never heard of the Sierra Club or its propaganda, it was a sign that this guy was bad news.

And when you get right down to it, why not? Wolves are cool, I’ll grant that, but so are sharks. We don’t have bookshelves groaning under the weight of heroes with shark friends. They are similar in their roles as well. They might not be the biggest, baddest predator in their realm, conceding mass and power to the bear and the killer whale, but they retain the mystique, as well as the ability to team up. We are too inured to the sight of bears dancing and riding bicycles in the circus or killer whales doing backflips for fish at the aquarium to take them seriously, plus your look is drawn right to their resemblance to cuddly plush toys or distinctive black and white markings that look like huge eyes. With wolves, like sharks, all you see is the bunch of streamlined, pointy gray motherfuckers who prominently feature big sharp teeth, are infamous for their sense of smell, and can both come at you totally by surprise, or screw with your head with their distinctive method of letting you know they’re in the area (howling, protruding dorsal fin).

These are thing the authors of the fairy tales and the campfire stories that became legends and myths witnessed and understood, and that modern people have forgotten thanks to all the charming National Geographic stories about their family lives or movies about Charles Martin Smith studying them and eating the same mice. When Bram Stoker wanted to symbolize his villain’s nature, he gave him an alternate wolf form and wolf minions. When C.S. Lewis realized his White Witch’s only minions were vague monsters and a pint-sized chauffer in a land of talking animals, he gave her wolf soldiers to pursue the heroes. When Tolkien wanted to make his undersized enemy species seem more badass and dangerous, he mounted them on wolves. As the Song of Ice and Fire goes further into its past and the Starks’ history is shown as more primal & bloody-handed than the hapless children of the current day, you are reminded that the kind of folks who picked a wolf for the family symbol were not exactly hippies, and not so much inclined to hug trees as sacrifice people to them. And let’s not even get into Jack London, whose books I read repeatedly before I got into any fantasy. You might think "Oh, White Fang is the protagonist and hero of his book," but the set up to his conception makes it abundantly clear where his roots are - it is a horror story of a bunch of guys (from their point of view, no less) being stalked by wolves, who pick them off one by one and kill them, before having sweet wolf sex and conceiving White Fang. That's right. One of the most iconic wolf heroes of literature is explicitly shown to be a scion of a murderous species and and particularly homicidal bloodline of that species as well.

As for Robert Jordan’s wolves, given his fairly obvious intention to play around with tropes and archetypes, the motivation for his treatment of wolves seems pretty clear. He inverted the traditional fantasy narrative by having the hero BE a dragon, rather than slay it, and rather than rewards for victory, the heroes’ love interests are burdens impeding their quests. Jordan took a lot of things that would normally be seen as good, like devout warrior monks, a multi-ethnic civilization founded by a great king famous for his justice, and a charming peddler with a distinctive Irish brogue, and made them into enemies, and gave the good guys allies who were traditionally villains, like gypsies who don’t want to fight a satanic analogue, racist Aryan superwarriors, witches, the undead, ogres...and wolves.

Wolves are badass, and it’s about time people remembered that first syllable. And now there’s a movie coming out where a guy trapped in the wilderness affixes broken glass to his knuckles in order to punch them. All I can say is “What took Hollywood so long?!”