Was Jeremy Renner Meant to Take Over the Mission: Impossible Franchise?

The Big Picture

• In the early 2010s, Jeremy Renner was being positioned as the new face of the Mission: Impossible franchise, but these plans didn’t pan out.
• Renner’s potential as a leading man was influenced by Tom Cruise’s diminishing star power and the need for a fresh face in the franchise.
• Renner’s career took a different path, with notable roles in other films like The Avengers, Hawkeye, and Mayor of Kingstown.

We all have ambitions that don’t quite pan out. In the early 2010s, Hollywood had grand plans for Jeremy Renner to be its new blockbuster leading man. This was the guy who would become an Avenger, take over the Jason Bourne movies, and, arguably most impressively, was being eyeballed to emerge as the new protagonist of the Mission: Impossible movies. A franchise previously intertwined with Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt, Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol was introducing Renner’s William Brandt as a potential new leading man for these blockbusters.

Today, in an age where the marketing for Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning: Part One was entirely predicated on Tom Cruise beckoning the presence of death by doing elaborate stunts, it may sound absurd for this blockbuster saga to abandon its original leading man. After all, Renner is mostly known as a character actor and one of the less=popular Avengers. But at this moment in time, it looked quite reasonable for Renner to be on standby as the next Mission: Impossible protagonist. Of course, these ambitions were among the many grand plans in Hollywood that just never panned out. The reasons why the mission to make Jeremy Renner the new face of Mission: Impossible went awry are, much like the complications that emerge on any of Ethan Hunt’s escapades, numerous.

Why Was Jeremy Renner Meant To Take Over From Tom Cruise?

In the late summer of 2010, the Mission: Impossible franchise was gearing up for a brand-new installment that would attempt to get the saga back on track after Mission: Impossible III hit a box office low for the franchise. Part of rejiggering the saga for modern audiences was hiring new cast members for pivotal roles in the production, like Jeremy Renner. A recently minted Oscar nominee for his work in The Hurt Locker, Renner was a rising star in Hollywood who had also just secured a spot as Clint Barton/Hawkeye in The Avengers. Circa. 2010, movie stars didn’t get hotter than Renner, even though he’d never headlined a mainstream motion picture before.

In November 2010, Renner opened up to MTV about what kind of a role he was expected to take on in the Mission: Impossible franchise. Renner was surprisingly open that his character was being eyeballed as the new potential lead for the entire franchise. Ideally, Ethan Hunt would be passing the Mission: Impossible torch over to William Brandt. Today, it sounds impossible for anyone but Tom Cruise to be at the center of this franchise. However, back in 2010, such a notion didn’t sound ludicrous at all. On the contrary, it sounded like savvy business management on the part of Paramount Pictures to keep a lucrative franchise running smoothly.

Hollywood Wasn’t Sure If Tom Cruise Was Still a Leading Man

In 2005, the wheels began to fall off Tom Cruise’s star power after a series of high-profile PR snafus, like jumping on Oprah Winfrey’s couch. The box office failure of Mission: Impossible III the following year sent shockwaves through the industry about whether or not Cruise still had the goods to headline movies. The subsequent dismal box office of Knight and Day in 2010 only seemed to reinforce the idea that Cruise’s brightest days as a movie star were behind him. While there was still enough cache in the long-running Mission: Impossible brand name to inspire Paramount Pictures to pursue further sequels, the studio was also angling for ways to make sure it didn’t live or die based on just one leading man.

Thus, Jeremy Renner entered the picture and became a potential new leading man for this lucrative saga. However, by the time Ghost Protocol was making its way to theaters, Renner publicly switched gears in terms of what he thought the future of the franchise was going to look like. He seemed quite certain now that Tom Cruise was here to stay as the protagonist of the Mission: Impossible movies. This thought process seemed extra likely once Ghost Protocol turned into a massive box office sensation. Cruise was no longer repelling audiences from seeing new big-budget movies, thus negating an urgent need for somebody like Jeremy Renner to take over the franchise. William Brandt would, for now, be a supporting player only.

Jeremy Renner’s Mission: Impossible Character Gets Ignored

Brandt would return for the sequel to Ghost Protocol, Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, with his returning presence seemingly cementing him as one of the new fixtures of this franchise. However, this feature would turn out to be his last appearance in the saga to date. Mission: Impossible – Fallout did not feature Brandt returning for more escapades, a development that apparently boiled down to simple scheduling conflicts. Writer/director Christopher McQuarrie revealed that the whole situation was an incredibly awkward scenario where Renner was being held back in early 2017 in case he was needed on the set of Avengers: Infinity War (he would not appear in that film) while the Fallout script was so fluid that McQuarrie and company couldn’t provide a concrete schedule for Marvel Studios.

McQuarrie did, however, come up with an idea for a Brandt cameo in Fallout, in which his character would be killed off in the movie’s opening scene to establish some major tension for the rest of the story. The scene would’ve required just a trio of days of work on the part of Renner, but the actor opted to pass on this opportunity. This came after Renner publicly expressed displeasure with his experience working with only fragments of a script during the production of Rogue Nation. Back in 2010, Jeremy Renner was positioned as the new face of Mission: Impossible. By 2018, he was growing disillusioned with the saga and had even been poised to simply get killed off in one incarnation of Fallout.

Jeremy Renner Isn’t a Huge Box Office Draw

It didn’t help, of course, that Jeremy Renner never quite panned out as the big leading man Hollywood wanted him to be. The Bourne Legacy, Renner’s 2012 stab at being the successor to Matt Damon in the Bourne films, did only so-so at the box office and didn’t garner much enthusiasm from audiences. Meanwhile, Renner’s 2013 fantasy action film Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters made some solid coin at the worldwide box office but never spawned a sequel. The lack of post-2012 heat on Renner almost certainly contributed to Paramount Pictures opting to keep Tom Cruise around as the leading man of the Mission: Impossible movies. By 2014, when Rogue Nation began principal photography, the age of Jeremy Renner being thought of as the new face of the Mission: Impossible movies was a distant memory.

That status quo is perfectly encapsulated by Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning: Part One, which never even references William Brandt. This franchise has moved on so drastically that Brandt no longer needs a bombastic death scene to be removed from the proceedings. Ethan Hunt and his best spy pals can get along just fine without Brandt because none of the elaborate missions scattered throughout the movie ever seem to desperately miss the specific elements Brandt brought to the table as a character in this franchise. The Mission: Impossible saga has ballooned dramatically in recent years and there doesn’t appear to be any elements in place for Part Two of this particular multi-film story arc to suddenly require the return of this particular character. William Brandt was once positioned as a new leading man for the Mission: Impossible saga, but now he’s just a relic of a specific era in the franchise’s history.

Jeremy Renner’s ‘The Mayor of Kingstown’ and ‘Hawkeye’ Are Recent Career Highs

Jeremy Renner did not become the next Tom Cruise like Hollywood imagined he would back in 2010, but that’s not a bad thing. For one, it’s not like his movies crashed and burned financially (The Bourne Legacy still made a respectable $280 million worldwide) and he became a fan-favorite member of the Avengers ensemble over the course of the 2010s. Meanwhile, after Witch Hunters marked the end of his blockbuster leading man days, he managed to score notable roles in grounded dramas like Arrival and Wind River, both of which scored impressive box office returns. Renner’s had a solid career that’s included two roles in especially well-reviewed Mission: Impossible installments. On the TV side, he led the way with Disney+’s Hawkeye series and is dominating Paramount+ with Taylor Sheridan‘s popular The Mayor of Kingstown.

Sometimes, grand plans don’t work out. That’s true for everybody from big movie stars to ordinary people trying to make it through another shift at a day job. Nobody can control the innately chaotic nature of the future, least of all actors like Jeremy Renner circa. 2010 suddenly thrust into the spotlight after years of working under the radar. The fact that plans for Renner to become the new lead of the Mission: Impossible movies didn’t pan out is more of a testament to that rampant uncertainty than any commentary on his talent as a performer. Just ask Ethan Hunt, he’ll be the first to tell you that the best plans can go haywire at the drop of a hat!