Scrapped opening

Director Christopher McQuarrie originally envisioned the opening plutonium exchange sequence in ‘Mission: Impossible - Fallout’ with the death of a member of Ethan’s team.

The filmmaker first considered Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames), but ultimately decided it wouldn’t work. Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg) was also a candidate, but McQuarrie felt the movie wouldn’t recover well if he were killed off.

McQuarrie then turned to Jeremy Renner’s William Brandt as a possible contender to be put up on the chopping block, and pitched the idea to the actor.

However, Renner declined, saying he “didn’t want to take a paycheck for three days and getting blown up”, and so his character was written out of the script.

As a tongue-in-cheek nod to the situation, both Luther and Benji, in separate moments after the shootout, remarked that “they should have been killed.”