Paramount Nearly Replaced Tom Cruise with Marvel's Jeremy Renner
Studio executives once explored removing Tom Cruise from Mission: Impossible and handing the franchise to Jeremy Renner. Here's how Cruise fought back to keep his iconic role.
The Mission: Impossible franchise and Tom Cruise seem inseparable, but studio executives at Paramount once seriously considered pushing the superstar aside. According to Simon Pegg, the company was actively looking at a future without Cruise leading the action, with Jeremy Renner - fresh off his Marvel success - being their top choice to take over the billion-dollar spy series.
Back then, Renner was riding high from his acclaimed performance in The Hurt Locker and was being positioned as Hollywood's next big action hero. But what drove Paramount to consider replacing their biggest moneymaker, and how did Cruise manage to hold onto his signature role?
Studio Concerns About Cruise's Public Image
Paramount's reluctance to continue with Tom Cruise in the late 2000s wasn't random. While he remained a massive box office attraction, his public persona had taken several damaging hits. The notorious Oprah Winfrey appearance, where he bounced on her couch professing his love, dominated headlines and left many questioning his behavior.
His controversial statements about psychiatry on the Today Show further worried studio bosses. These incidents made executives nervous about the actor's marketability. In early versions of Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, the script called for Ethan Hunt to suffer a career-ending leg injury, forcing him into a desk job at the IMF.
This storyline would have cleared the path for Jeremy Renner's character, William Brandt, to step up as the franchise's new action star. The plan essentially stripped away everything that made Cruise's character essential to the series, keeping him around but removing him from the center stage.
Cruise's Bold Move to Save His Career
Replacing an aging action star with younger talent is standard Hollywood practice, but Tom Cruise wasn't interested in following that playbook. According to Simon Pegg's account, Cruise took decisive action by flying from Vancouver to Los Angeles specifically to confront Paramount chairman Brad Grey at a party, where he personally killed the replacement plan.
The actor brought in Christopher McQuarrie, a trusted screenwriter, and Ghost Protocol was completely rewritten to restore Ethan Hunt as the unstoppable field operative audiences knew and loved. The gamble paid off spectacularly - the film became a huge hit and allowed Cruise to continue carrying the franchise through multiple sequels.
The Mission: Impossible series has generated over $4 billion worldwide across eight films, with ratings consistently improving from the early entries to recent installments like Fallout, which earned a 98% rating from critics. Cruise's refusal to step aside proved to be the right call for both his career and Paramount's bottom line.