Jeremy Renner Addresses His Mission: Impossible Exit and Potential Franchise Return

Renner reveals why he "had to leave" the action franchise.

By Jenna Anderson

For over two decades, the Mission: Impossible franchise has been telling a high-octane action story, with a number of stars joining the saga in one way or another. That includes Jeremy Renner's William Brandt, who appeared in two of the franchise's films and was briefly rumored to be Tom Cruise's successor as the main character. Renner didn't reprise his role in Mission: Impossible — Fallout and Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning, but it sounds like he isn't necessarily done with the franchise. In a recent interview with Collider, Renner explained his decision to step away from Mission: Impossible, and revealed that he's more than willing to return to the role, if the opportunity presented itself.

"Yeah. I had to leave that," Renner explained. "I was supposed to do more with them. I love those guys. I love Tom [Cruise] so much. We had so much fun, and I love that character a lot. It requires a lot of time away. It's all in London. I had to go be a dad. It just wasn't gonna work out then... Maybe now that my daughter is older that could happen. I'd always jump into a Mission: Impossible anytime and back into Brandt. It's great."

Will Jeremy Renner Return to the MCU?

Another role of Renner's that fans have wanted to see more of is the Marvel Cinematic Universe's Clint Barton / Hawkeye, who has not appeared onscreen since the 2021 Hawkeye Disney+ series. While speaking exclusively to ComicBook earlier this year, Renner revealed that he is definitely on board with the possibility of returning to the character.

"I leave the storytelling and the narrative to the writers and all that," Renner explained. "But I do love the character, and if they called and asked for me to do it, I'll be prepared. Feige, I'm stretching right now, my guy!" 

What Is Mission: Impossible 8 About?

Mission: Impossible 8 is expected to continue the narrative of 2023's Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One, which saw Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) face off against one of his most personal enemies yet.

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"When I came up with the title, I knew it applied more to Part Two than it did to Part One, which is why it eventually settled on being Part One and Part Two," director Christopher McQuarrie explained in a previous interview with Light the Fuse. "The title for the first movie was nearly ... a title that referred to something like a Ghost Protocol kind of thing, it was a government policy – It wasn't a government policy, it was a government, what would you call it? A government measure of last resort, with catastrophic consequences. By the time we got to the end of Part One, that had distilled down into an entirely different set of circumstances that appear in Part Two and not in Part One. So, the word would no longer have been appropriate for the title of Part One."

"And yet, Dead Reckoning didn't really apply as well to Part One as well as it did to Part Two until we started to play with the beginning of the movie, and kind of recognize that Dead Reckoning, while it sounded cool, what did it really have to do with the movie?" McQuarrie continued. "And over the course of our, really starting to dig down into the arc of the character journey for Ethan [Hunt], it took on deeper and deeper meanings as we went. And you'll see just how thematic and how it represents, how it's conceptually represented in every character's journey in this film we're in."

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