Having just learned that one of Game of Thrones’ most ambitious and capable directors, Miguel Sapochnik (“Battle of the Bastards,” “Hardhome”), could very well direct half of the show’s final season, fans may now rejoice to learn just how many resources the director will have at his disposal. The network is ramping up the budget, big time, for the eighth and final season of the jewel in its Peak TV crown. According to a new report from Variety, the final six episodes of Game of Thrones will cost a staggering $15 million apiece—and we’ve heard the real budget may actually be much, much higher than that.

In recent years, the standard for oh-my-God-that’s-expensive TV has been around $10 million per episode. That’s the incredible amount Netflix put down for both its enormously successful The Crown and its far less successful The Get Down. It’s also, ballpark, what an episode of Game of Thrones has cost HBO for the past few years. But the final six episodes of Thrones will all reportedly be feature-length. The longest episode of the series to date, the Season 7 finale, clocked in at just shy of 80 minutes—and each episode of the final season would be even longer than that.

So it stands to reason that if each episode is roughly half again as long as the standard $10 million installment, then it should cost $15 million—a.k.a. half again as much or more. Thrones sound designer Paula Fairfield told Vanity Fair that there were more dragon scenes in Season 7 than in any of the other seasons combined, and we can only expect there to be even more in Season 8 as our heroes gather around Daenerys for the Great War to Come. Fairfield even teased that we’ll likely see a dragon-on-dragon battle between Drogon and his undead brother, Viserion. Those special effects (which have improved immeasurably over the years) will be costly. There are also all those zombie giants marching in the army of the undead to consider, as well as those incredible stunt-riding Dothraki screamers.

But there’s also the possibility that with such an astronomical budget, Thrones won’t have to sacrifice fan-favorite elements—like the surviving Stark direwolves—in order to make room for dragons. When asked why Jon’s wolf, Ghost (who was completely cut from Season 7), didn’t show up in his Season 6 episode “Battle of the Bastards,” Sapochnik cited the budget: “[Ghost] was in there in spades originally, but it's also an incredibly time-consuming and expensive character to bring to life. Ultimately, we had to choose between Wun-Wun [the giant] and the direwolf, so the dog bit the dust.” With Arya’s wolf, Nymeria, likely to return for the final battle and Ghost very much in need of at least one final scene, this swollen budget means Sapochnik and the other directors may not be forced to choose between dragons, giants, and direwolves (oh my).

Still, it’s dazzling to consider just how far Game of Thrones has come. In recent years, show-runners D.B. Weiss and David Benioff may have been able to command $10 million per episode for a show that has become famous for its visually dazzling battles—but back in Season 2 they had to go begging to even include a fight. After nimbly side-stepping the Battle of Green Fork altogether in the first season (Tyrion gets knocked out and wakes to find all the fighting over), Weiss and Benioff almost had to do the same for the now-famous Battle of Blackwater Bay.