Tom Cruise’s ‘Mission: Impossible’ Team Is Down A Member Because Of The Marvel Cinematic Universe

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The Mission: Impossible series has gone through five directors in six movies. That kind of behind-the-scenes instability is usually not a sign of success, but the Tom Cruise-starring franchise somehow keeps getting more fun and more thrilling, and the upcoming Fallout sounds like the best installment yet. It’s also the Mission: Impossible with the least amount of movie-to-movie cast turnover.

Cruise is back, obviously, but so is Rebecca Ferguson, Simon Pegg, Alec Baldwin, and Ving Rhames. That’s rare consistency for a franchise that began with Ethan Hunt being paired with… Emilio Estevez? But, as expected, there’s one member of IMF who isn’t in Fallout: William Brandt, as played by Jeremy Renner. He was busy with another, even bigger cinematic universe.

“At the time, when the movie started, we didn’t really have a screenplay, so it was very difficult for us to say who would be in the movie for how long and on what days, and he had a commitment to Marvel,” writer and director (but not for Star Wars!) Christopher McQuarrie told Digital Spy about Hawkeye’s absence.

“So there was just simply no predicting. If we had a finished script, we would have been able to say, ‘Yes, this will work and we can let you go for this time,’ but there was just no predicting what those roles were going to turn out to be. It was just an unfortunate case of bad timing.”

Between not being in Mission: Impossible — Fallout, which is being called the “most exhilarating movie you’ll see all year,” and Avengers: Infinity War, the highest-grossing film of 2018, Jeremy Renner better hope he’s in EVERY scene in Avengers 4. But hey, at least his broken arms were the star of Tag.

(Via Digital Spy)