Since I spent a lot of Monday on an airplane when our server wasn’t down, I thought I’d take a moment to update on some new production news that has broken earlier this week.

Much like we reported earlier (in September actually), Simon Pegg and Nick Frost (Shawn of the Dead, Hot Fuzz) have been cast in the Tin Tin films as Thompson and Thompson. The first film is due out in 2010, and this is one of the few castings that has been confirmed, that and Andy Serkis as Captain Haddock. No Tin Tin yet, but as long as it isn’t Elijah Wood, I’m cool.

Jonah Hex, a film we last covered here, went through a director switch. Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor (of Crank) are out and Jimmy Hayward (Horton Hears a Who) is in, directing his first live action film. Josh Brolin is still attached to star as Hex, the facially-disfigured Western bounty-hunter/gunslinger.

Rob Zombie’s Halloween 2, or H2 as it has begun to be called, has some casting asides up on the web, meaning that Zombie has ditched his previous project in pre-production (alliteration ho!), Tyrannosaurus Rex in favor of getting the sequel off the ground in time to make some money for the Halloween season.

Tr2n, and I will be replacing that “O” with that “2” until we get an official poster saying otherwise, has cast it’s lead: Garrett Hedlund, a man with the unfortunate boast of having debuted in Troy, the god-awful-and-god-less Brad Pitt vehicle. You might have also seen him in the Felicity Huffman/Lindsay Lohan starring Georgia Rule. Hopefully you have no idea who this guy is, because the unknown lead who gets sucked into the world of Tron is a much better start than any of his previous characters.

I’ll round this out with some geek-riffic news. Quantum Quest, a 3D animated film being financed independently by Taiwanese company Digimax and NASA has added two Darth Vaders and two Captain Kirks to it’s voice cast. Kirks: William Shatner and Chris Pine. Vaders: James Earl Jones and Hayden Christianson. Other cast: Luke Skywalker himself (Mark Hamill), Samuel L. Jackson, Amanda Peet, Jason Alexander, Sandra Oh, Abigail and Spencer Breslin. Did I mention Neil Armstrong is making his voice acting debut? The story centers on Dave (Pine), a photon who lives in the sun and who is drawn into a galactic battle between the Core (Shatner) and the Void (Hamill).

And, for your daily WTF link of the day, enjoy this completely non-production story of a wild horse that wandered into a movie theater.