The disparate subjects of human nature and Jeremy Renner nature collided tragically this week, as the official Jeremy Renner app, which has existed on the internet since—Jesus, really?—2017, has apparently announced that it’s being shuttered. The news came after people confirmed what we’ve all suspected all along: That no one is mature or strong enough to deal with that level of Jeremy Renner access day in, day out, without collectively losing their goddamn minds.
If you’ve been on the internet over the last week or two, you’ve probably gotten a hint of some of the app’s various troubles, as people who would sincerely like a place to connect—not just with Jeremy, but with the inner Renner inside all of us—ran smack into a wall of people who think it is very, very funny that Jeremy Renner has an app. Comedy writer Stefan Heck, writing for our colleagues over at Deadspin, detailed his own trials and travails with the app and its attitudes toward topics like “porno” earlier this week, even as the rest of the internet has dutifully filed in to shoot the fish in a self-selected barrel labeled “People who would willingly download a Jeremy Renner app, and also Jeremy Renner himself.”
The biggest problem, as far as we can tell, is that the app, when installed, only asks for some personal data and phone access, rather than testing comprehensively for Jeremy Renner fandom. (By, say, hooking would-be users up to a polygraph and asking them if Hawkeye is in their top 20 Avengers, no laughing, please; we would also accept “Hey, what are your top four Bourne movies?” or “Is it cool when it looks like someone has smelled something bad forever, y/n?”) And now the grand mad experiment has come to a tragic close, as a message that’s probably from the actual Jeremy Renner team—although, to be fair there are a lot of DoppelJeremys running around on this thing, CGI arms akimbo—seemed to announce that it was shutting down. (We question the veracity mostly because the message says that the app “literally” jumped the shark, which we can’t imagine is true—although that also seems like the sort of mistake the devs of a Jeremy Renner app might make.)
As noted by The Ringer, this isn’t actually the first time the Jeremy Renner app—and boy, are we looking forward to never having to type that three-word-phrase ever again as soon as we hit publish on this thing—has undergone the heavy footfall of cinema’s second-favorite Hansel; the app has been wiped and relaunched at least once and possibly more in the past, scouring it clean of the accumulated wreckage of disappointed Renner-heads. (That Ringer article is worth reading if you really don’t want to feel good about any aspect of the human race today, by the way; accusations of “infiltration,” bullying, and manipulation have apparently been rampant in this so-called digital utopia from the start.)
It’s possible that we, as a people, just aren’t ready for the burden and power of a Jeremy Renner app; that no soul, when placed in the crucible of such untapped ambition, can help but wither under its slightly-too-closed-eye gaze. It doesn’t help that Renner feels like the perfect victim/prophet for this kind of online fascination, possessed as he is of the sort of self-seriousness that plants a big ol’ Hawkeye-style bullseye on his back for the more irony-drenched aspects of the internet to come and feast. But now, the buffet is closed; the trolls will presumably have to migrate over to the Dominic Monaghan app—which, like the Renner app, and more than a hundred other similar vanity programs, is run by a company called escapex—instead. Still, we did it to ourselves: We won’t have Jeremy Renner to kick around any more, except for his music career, which also seems kind of bad.