UPDATE: Looking further into this, it seems while Jeremy Renner was filming Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation he was also going through a custody battle with his ex-wife, which appears to have been resolved in early April. This is the added source of tension the actor was up against while shooting both M:I 5 and Avengers: Age of Ultron, especially given how far away he was at the time of shooting. For more on the story click here. I typically stay away from this kind of personal stuff and wouldn’t have written about his comments had I looked deeper from the start. For that I apologize. My original article follows.
As far as the rest of Summer 2015 is concerned, the film I’m looking most forward to seeing is Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation. Paramount originally slated the film for a December release, but bumped it up to July 31. Whether that was because they thought Terminator Genisys would be the stinker it turned out to be and were hoping for a true summer hit or whatever other reason they may had, I’m happy to see it a month early. I just hope they haven’t sacrificed quality for release date, and if you’re one to believe everything that comes out of a film producer’s mouth (trust me, don’t do that) then you’ll believe they haven’t sacrificed anything.
Speaking with Collider, Skydance exec Dana Goldberg spoke of preview screenings for the film where it is testing higher than the very well received Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol:
It is getting better and better with each episode. Credit to [director] Chris McQuarrie and Tom Cruise and Don Granger who works with us, and it’s a phenomenal movie. It’s a phenomenal movie and I think I’m officially allowed to say that we tested even higher than Ghost Protocol. There’s not a lot of times in your life, you dream about them, but those moments you go to a preview screening and everybody’s there, your director, your star, the studio, you sit there and from the second the movie starts, you’re just like ‘oh, this feels really, really good’. It feels that way from top to bottom, and then they walk in and they tell you what the audience thought and it felt even better to the audience than it did to you, and that’s how we felt in Arizona a couple weeks ago.
If you need something to hang your hat on, there’s something for you, but co-star Jeremy Renner sounds like he isn’t as ready to sing the film’s praises, or, more accurately, he doesn’t appear to have had much fun shooting the project.
Reprising his role as William Brandt from Ghost Protocol, Renner spoke of the London shoot with Playboy and it sounds like the combination of this shoot and Avengers: Age of Ultron may have kept him farther away from his daughter for longer intervals than he would have liked.
“I love Tom, Simon Pegg and everybody else who is in that movie. I love my character. I was happy to be doing it,” Renner said. “The ultimate challenge and difficulty on that movie and Avengers: Age of Ultron was that they both shot in London, which took me 11 hours away from Ava. That was what caused any cantankerousness, agitation or negative feelings I had about the whole moviemaking experience.”
His impression of the film and what it has to offer doesn’t necessarily sound glowing either, as if some of that cantankerousness still remains. He added, “This Mission was like all the Missions — great action set pieces with an idea of a story somewhere in there. There have been four successful versions before this one, so why would I fight the process? I just went and gave to the best of my ability in the scenario I was in.”
“Now, was it the best scenario for me? The best at what I’m good at?” he continued. “Fuck, no. Not having any information about what the heck is going on doesn’t empower any artists to be at the best of their ability. I trusted Tom Cruise, Chris McQuarrie and the studio, and I went with it.”
So, there’s a story “somewhere” in the film and Renner didn’t have information about what was going on and just “went with it”? That sounds a bit odd, though following the Age of Ultron press tour I am thinking a certain level of exhaustion has to be setting in.
This isn’t to say the film will be bad, but the comments sure do raise an eyebrow. All I’ll say is I hope that “an anti-IMF” line doesn’t make the final cut of the film, because that is just so on the nose and stupid it makes me cringe when I hear it.
We’ll know more soon enough and the producers did reveal the film is being digitally remastered, a process referred to as DMR, for IMAX screens. Just know the film was not shot in IMAX.
All that said, just below are three new TV spots and the final, payoff poster.
