It’s weird to think that Mission: Impossible didn’t really become the franchise we know and love today until its fourth movie, Ghost Protocol, which released in 2011 to both critical acclaim and truck-loads of cash, thereby revitalizing the brand and ensuring Tom Cruise returned as Ethan Hunt for three more films and counting. And yet, if Paramount Pictures had gotten its way, Cruise would’ve been ousted in favor of then-up-and-coming star Jeremy Renner.
When reflecting back on Brad Bird’s only M:I outing to date for its tenth anniversary back in 2021, stunt coordinator Gregg Smrz dropped the bombshell that Ghost Protocol almost had a very different, much more shocking, ending. As he told Yahoo Entertainment, the original plan was for Hunt to receive a career-ending injury in the line of duty. However, Cruise himself didn’t want to let go of this franchise, the planned stunt was ditched at the last minute, and the rest is box office history.
“There was a point in the script when he’s fighting Michael Nyqvist where he was supposed to get his leg broken,” Smrz recalled. “They wanted it hyper-extended at the knee, just shredded — end of career, you know? The studio was going to write him out, and Tom did not want it. He was strapping in his harness, looked at me and said, ‘I ain’t going nowhere.’ Then he walked out on set and did his thing. We had [the leg break] all set and ready to go, and it disappeared.”
Cinematographer Robert Elswit provided more context on how things could’ve gone down when chatting to Syfy in 2019. According to Elswit’s info, it sounds like Cruise would’ve stuck around, but only as the boss for a new team of operatives, most likely led by Jeremy Renner’s William Brandt (introduced in this same movie):
“The original version of [Ghost Protocol] was at the end of it Tom Cruise stops being Ethan Hunt the agent and becomes Ethan Hunt the Secretary,” Elswit explained. “They were gonna put another IMF Mission unit together with another actor — maybe it’s Jeremy Renner, who knows who it is — and they’re gonna go through this series of wild events, and at the end, Tom gets to be the Secretary and a new agent takes over the franchise.”
On top of Cruise’s determination not to go anywhere, the decision to keep Hunt in the midst of the action apparently also came from Christopher McQuarrie. Although McQuarrie didn’t officially take the reins of the franchise until 2015’s Rogue Nation, he performed an uncredited rewrite of Ghost Protocol that ensured Ethan Hunt remained the series protagonist. Elswit continued:
“Chris came in and he kind of rewrote it, the last half, maybe more, and made it so that we had to change a few things … so that it all made sense. He tied the whole thing together and made it so that at the end of the movie, Tom ends up not becoming the Secretary but just goes on in his own lonely way.”
12 years later and Cruise is still just as dedicated to these movies as ever, even recently joking (we think) that he hopes to still be making Mission: Impossible when he’s as old as Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Seeing as both Rogue Nation and 2018’s Fallout made over $1.5 billion between them, ditching Cruise could’ve had serious repercussions for this franchise. But thankfully Ethan Hunt’s future being secure means Mission: Impossible‘s own dead reckoning is many years away yet.
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One opens in theaters worldwide on July 12.