If you’ve had a chance to check out Mission: Impossible – Fallout, you may have noticed the distinct lack of one Jeremy Renner in it. Sure, you had all the regulars: Tom Cruise, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Alec Baldwin, and even Rebecca Ferguson. But Jeremy Renner? Nah, sorry.

So what’s the reason for this? Why did Renner end up sitting this one out like he did in Avengers: Infinity War? It turns out, it’s for a pretty good reason — he didn’t have a lot of open time in his schedule:

“Jeremy had his commitment to Avengers, which ironically they ended up not exercising, and we didn’t know what the [sixth Mission] movie was, so we couldn’t provide a schedule. We needed absolute freedom. The unfortunate thing for Jeremy is that he got caught in this perfect storm of, one can’t use you and one doesn’t know how to, given the massive complications they had with Avengers.”

RELATED – Mission: Impossible – Fallout Takes In $61.5 Million In Opening Weekend

Luckily, McQuarrie had this great idea…

“I had this whole idea that the movie would start with the death of a team member. And of course the first team member that’s always the first guy we talk about killing is Luther. Luther died in the first movie, and he quite famously said to Tom Cruise, ‘Hey man, how come the brother’s always gotta die?’ And Tom said, ‘You’re right.’ He was like, ‘Why do I gotta be the bad guy?’ And they made Luther nefarious and then suddenly a good guy, and six movies later it was the smartest question anybody’s ever asked Tom Cruise […] So I said to Jeremy, look we can’t kill Ving, it’s never going to work. No matter how many movies into it, it’s always going to be the same thing. You killed the black guy. And we didn’t think the movie could recover if you killed Benji.”

“So I said to Renner, ‘Hey listen, I have this idea for an opening sequence where you sacrifice yourself to save the team, and that the mission-gone-wrong not only involves losing the plutonium, but involves the death of a team member.’ And Jeremy was like, ‘Thanks, but no thanks’ […] He was smart not to take the short paycheck for three days of work and getting blown up.”

Smart man, that Renner. Now, thanks to this move, his character could actually come back in the next film — and even better for Renner, he can lock down a much larger paycheck. Everyone wins!

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SOURCE: Empire