While things are a bit shaky in terms of what we’re calling the newest Mission: Impossible film, one thing is for sure: the cast is going to kick ass. Hawkeye himself, Jeremy Renner joined the cast a few weeks back, which was already headed by returning Cruise, Ving Rhames, and Simon Pegg, and the newly added Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Maggie Q.

Now, a brand new face of awesome is jumping in, as LOST star Josh Holloway has been signed to join Cruise’s new team of super spies. This marks Holloway’s first major role since leaving the island, or dying, or staying in purgatory, or however you want to interpret that ending.

Between this cast, Incredibles director Brad Bird taking the helm, and J.J. Abrams supplying the story, there is very little room for this film to fail, or at least we hope. Megastar Cruise even took a pay cut in order for this film to get made, so it has that going for it.

The movie is set to go into production before the end of the year, with a release date of December 16th, 2011. Expect to hear plenty more news coming out of this camp in the coming weeks as we lead up to principal photography.

Any real fans of the Simon Pegg/Nick Frost/Edgar Wright trio know that they all didn’t meet on the set of Shaun of the Dead. In fact, the reason they got the chance to do Shaun was due to the success of a 1999 BBC TV series they all created called Spaced.

The show, starring Pegg, Frost, and Jessica Hynes, was about a comic book artist who has to fake a marriage with a complete stranger in order to stay in an apartment made for “professional couples.” The show was quirky and funny, and developed a huge cult following on DVD. It also seemed to turn the heads of a few US producers, including McG and now producer of Chuck and Human Target, Peter Johnson.

The U.S. version of the show was a failure, to say the least, and never made it past the pilot stage. None of the original creative team were involved, or even brought into the loop that the show existed, until recently. Simon Pegg twittered a clip from the failed pilot, starring Sara Rue (Less Than Perfect), Josh Lawson, and Will Sasso (MadTV).

Take a look at the clip after the jump, and you’ll understand why the show never made it past the unaired pilot. The only thing worth mentioning is that Will Sasso truly is the US version of Nick Frost. Outside of that, there isn’t much going for this half-assed clone of a show.

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Ever since the news first came through about Disney and Marvel joining, everybody and their mother came out of the woodwork with their ideas for Disney/Marvel mash up ideas. Such bad ideas as Finding Namor, HERB-E, Casper the Friendliest Ghostrider, and All Dogs go to Asgard were thrown into the mix, but no one had any thoughts on Disney working on a real-life Marvel property.

It looks like that time has come, as Pixar is interested in taking on one of Marvel’s first superheroes, Ant-Man. According to Entertainment Weekly, “Marvel has thousands of characters to feed Disney’s film, TV, and animation business (Pixar is said to already be eyeballing an Ant-Man movie). As Iron Man proved, they don’t need to be iconic to become blockbusters.”

Last we heard, the Ant-Man property was already in the works for a feature film, to be helmed by Shaun of the Dead team Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg, and Nick Frost with a script cowritten by BBC comedian Joe Cornish. Though the ilk of the writer/directors was that of comedy, the team insisted that the film was to be purely action based. Back in March of 2008, the film reportedly went on hold, and hadn’t been heard from since.

With Pixar taking on the film, you can believe that the story won’t be about Eric O’Grady, also known as The Irredeemable Ant-Man. Now that Disney has their mitts on the project, the story will presumably take more of a family friendly tone, which could be a bad thing or a good thing (these are the same people that brought us The Incredibles). No word yet on details of the film, if the original script will still stand, or if Wright and his team will be staying on the project.