as death-defying super-spy Ethan Hunt. Cruise is ed by fellow returning cast Rebecca Ferguson, Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames, Alec Baldwin and Sean Harris. Henry Cavill and Angela Bassett are the newest additions to the cast.

Early in the Mission: Impossible series, when characters popped up and disappeared at an alarming rate, only Cruise's Hunt and Rhames' Luther Stickell recurred from film to film. Starting with Mission: Impossible III, Simon Pegg's computer wiz Benji ed the stable of characters and will now appear in his fourth series film. Jeremy Renner also became an official regular after his two appearances as William Brandt in Ghost Protocol and Rogue Nation. However, Renner will not make it three in a row with this summer's Fallout.

Related: Henry Cavill Shows How to Reload Your Arm Guns Mission: Impossible Style

So what happened to Renner aka William Brandt? As Mission: Impossible - Fallout director Christopher McQuarrie explained to began shooting with no script) and schedules simply could not be worked out in order to make it happen. McQuarrie said:

"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. 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,"

Mission Impossible Jeremy Renner

At one point during the production of Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, it was rumored that a plan was in place to gently push Tom Cruise aside and install Renner as the series' new lead. However, that didn't end up happening and Renner found himself relegated to a ing role for Rogue Nation, instead. The William Brandt arc, which saw him go from analyst to reluctant field agent in Ghost Protocol, then to behind-the-scenes sparring partner for Alec Baldwin's Alan Hunley in Rogue Nation, appears to have come to an end with Fallout.

Amusingly, this marks the second time in 2018 that Renner has gotten attention for his is getting great reviews and is tracking to be a big hit, so it seems assured there will be at least one more movie in the series.

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Source: Digital Spy