Jeremy Renner was positioned to be the new lead for two major action franchises in the 2010s - Renner scored leading roles in Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol and The Bourne Legacy.
Those two properties are synonymous with a headlining star - Tom Cruise for Mission: Impossible and Matt Damon for Bourne. But for a brief moment, it looked like Renner was going to succeed both of them and be a prominent action star for a number of years. Unfortunately for him, things didn't work out that way and Renner didn't become the face of either franchise. In an ironic twist, he even got phased out of both.
Paramount's original ending for Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol called for Cruise's Ethan Hunt to retire from the field, giving way to a new agent. That presumably would have been Renner's William Brandt. At the time, the studio's strategy was understandable. Cruise's box office star had diminished prior to Ghost Protocol's release, so Paramount felt injecting new blood into the franchise would do some good. However, bolstered by script rewrites from Christopher McQuarrie, Ghost Protocol ended up rejuvenating Cruise's career and status as a Hollywood action icon. Audiences responded very positively to Cruise's knack for performing death-defying stunts like scaling the Burj Khalifa, and Ghost Protocol reaffirmed he was the undisputed star of the Mission: Impossible films. Brandt was a good character, but Cruise was the engine that made the whole franchise run.
Renner's attempt at snagging the Bourne lead came up short for very different reasons. In contrast from Damon's original trilogy, which arguably got better as it went along, The Bourne Legacy earned a lukewarm reception. The mixed reviews hurt the spinoff's commercial prospects, as The Bourne Legacy was the lowest-grossing installment domestically with only $113.2 million. That effectively killed any chances of a Bourne Legacy sequel, putting the franchise in a holding pattern until Damon and director Paul Greengrass returned for 2016's Jason Bourne. There simply wasn't much audience interest in seeing a Bourne movie without Damon, so Universal decided to move on from Renner's Aaron Cross.
As a result, Renner's future in Mission: Impossible and Bourne is tenuous at best. In regards to the latter, Jason Bourne was met with a mixed response as well, and there hasn't been much talk about another installment in the years since. The Bourne TV show Treadstone was cancelled after one season; there were reports of a Bourne movie being in development that could connect to Treadstone, but that probably won't happen now. Even if a new Bourne film gets off the ground, Aaron Cross won't be a part of it. Renner did reprise Brandt in 2015's Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation, but he was still very much in a ing role as Cruise wowed audiences by hanging on to airplanes and speeding along on a motorcycle. At that point, Renner became so inessential to Mission: Impossible, he didn't return for Mission: Impossible - Fallout (in part due to his commitment to the Avengers movies) and so far Mission: Impossible 7 or 8. Barring any surprises, Renner's time in that franchise could be over.
