Jeremy Renner Explains Why Marvel Backed Him — and Cut Ties With Jonathan Majors
Jeremy Renner pulls back the curtain on Marvel’s calculus, explaining why he believes the studio cut ties with Jonathan Majors after his turn as Kang but kept him in the fold—offering a candid glimpse at how the MCU decides who stays and who goes.
Jeremy Renner went on The Breakfast Club and got the question a lot of people have quietly asked: why did Marvel keep him around but cut ties with Jonathan Majors? He didn’t give a smoking-gun answer, but he did share a little about what he knows (and what he doesn’t), and he took a swipe at what he sees as cancel culture. Let’s unpack it.
What Renner actually said
"I don’t know. I don’t know enough about Jonathan and his situation to know. I know they had big plans for that character. That’s for sure. Whatever transpired, that sucks. I think due diligence really has to be played out."
Renner made it clear he’s not inside the Majors decision-making loop. He did say Marvel’s Kang plans were big — no shock there — and stressed that due process matters. When Charlamagne tha God suggested Marvel’s response to each actor didn’t feel fair, the host also noted he wasn’t equating the two situations, just comparing how the studio handled them. Renner’s take? There’s more to the calculation than we see, and he pushed back on what he called cancel culture.
Why this came up
The comparison isn’t random. In 2019, Renner’s ex-wife, Sonni Pacheco, accused him of multiple things, including drug use, threatening to kill her, and firing a gun while their daughter was nearby. Renner has repeatedly denied those allegations.
Meanwhile, Jonathan Majors was sentenced in 2024 to 52 weeks of counseling and probation for assaulting his former girlfriend. After that, Marvel decided to part ways with him. Renner didn’t pretend to have insider reasons for why Marvel treated the two cases differently — he basically said he doesn’t know and kept it moving.
Where they sit in the MCU
- Jonathan Majors played Kang the Conqueror/He Who Remains, showing up in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023) and Loki on Disney+ before Marvel let him go.
- Jeremy Renner is one of the original Avengers as Clint Barton/Hawkeye, in the MCU since before the first Avengers movie even hit. His latest Marvel appearance was the 2024 series Echo.
So, bottom line: Renner says he doesn’t know why Marvel kept him and cut Majors, only that the studio had major plans for Kang and that the whole thing is messy. Not exactly a tidy answer, but that’s usually how these behind-the-scenes decisions go — opaque, corporate, and not designed to make sense on a podcast timeline.