I was joking that if Sony ImageWorks doesn't already have a relatively complete digital backlot for just about all of Manhattan between the Spider-Man and Ghostbusters franchises alone, then what have they been doing...
The interesting/tough part would presumably be inter-effects house sharing/community work. I'm almost surprised that there doesn't seem to be a company focused entirely on reuseable digital backlots because that does seem like a niche that someone in Hollywood would already be exploring.
You could also see it coming from an outside direction, too. If I was Rockstar and already throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at digital open world simulations, I'd probably be shopping that around as the basis for digital backlot work. "Filmed 'on location' in GTA V's Los Santos" sounds almost silly right now, but I've got a feeling it won't for much longer. (Also, I would suspect it's Vancouver-based genre television that would be in the market for this before films.)
There is some model reuse, but the economics of piracy work against it: if it's just a copy of something that's been seen before, nobody wants to pay anything substantial for it. One reason I stopped working full-time in film was the constant pressure to slash my prices. I was able to make enough to stay afloat for a decade or so, but not to grow my business. by investing in a large stock of equipment or hiring permanent staff of my own. No matter how good you are you are constantly being asked to work for free or below market rate, because distribution income is like a black hole; production money goes in but it's not obvious where it comes back out. In the indie world the typical distribution deal covers the costs of production, legal etc. and only that. So your film gets distribution - yay! - but you won't see any revenue from it until the production cost has been paid off and the distribution company has made a profit, so possibly never. Once you get distribution the project is dead and has to be forgotten about other than as a line on your resume - the fact that you can mention the existence of a distributor tells potential investors that they have a better-than-even chance of getting their money back if they spend it on you.
Sony Imageworks had a reusable digital library for the buildings in Manhattan. The fire from GhostRider also saw reuse. These models are tied to the production pipeline at Sony: the shaders, data formats, texture pipeline, effects pipeline etc. A reusable backlot company does not exist because a standard studio production pipeline does not exist.
This is an interesting point. As an outsider to all of it, I'm curious if the open source work Pixar started and Disney has continued in standardizing various asset pipelines is helping, or at least might eventually help the landscape here.
Again as a relatively pure outsider, it is interesting to watch the internal competition between Disney Feature Animation's renderer [Hyperion] and Pixar's RenderMan, and similarly have been curious about how much of that externally visible open source standardizing work on at least the pipelines leading to the renderers contributes and/or constrains the friendly seeming internal rivalry. Similarly with Disney now owning ILM, if ILM has or has not been building on top of some of the same production pipeline standards...
Historically, a lot of the benefit to the Hollywood studio system was that a lot of the parts were standardized and interchangeable between studios. While a lot of studios did experiment with innovations in camera technology, very few studios had to reinvent the camera from scratch.
Given how many special effects houses work on a blockbuster level film these days, I would imagine that the efficiencies in shared asset pipelines between corporate boundaries would eventually win out. It seems silly (at least as an industry outsider) that every company working on, for one example, an Iron Man film would have a different set of models/textures/shaders for Iron Man. (I get that on the one hand it's a bit like stunt work in that you don't need your A-list actor in every stunt or B-roll shot, but on the other hand, digital "actors" don't get fatigued or injured and can be in multiple places at once, they don't need body doubles/stunt actors...)
There has been standardization in many areas since the days of Toy Story: Autodesk Maya,
Houdini, Nuke are now standards in the industry.
It took a while for forward thinking technical managers to convince studio executives
that open-sourcing some internal tools and data formats would benefit the studio by
making it a standard within the industry. OpenEXR (image format, ILM),
Alembic(data format, Imageworks), OpenSubdiv(subdivison surfaces, Pixar),
Ptex(texture mapping, Disney) are examples that were quickly adopted across studios.
It helps that artists and engineers tend to move across studios bringing with them
ideas about what worked best at the previous studio.
In general, the software teams at the studios fall under the line item of "Overhead"
in a producers financial spreadsheet. There is pressure to reduce this overhead by
adopting standardized tools and not reinventing things in-house.
The interesting/tough part would presumably be inter-effects house sharing/community work. I'm almost surprised that there doesn't seem to be a company focused entirely on reuseable digital backlots because that does seem like a niche that someone in Hollywood would already be exploring.
You could also see it coming from an outside direction, too. If I was Rockstar and already throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at digital open world simulations, I'd probably be shopping that around as the basis for digital backlot work. "Filmed 'on location' in GTA V's Los Santos" sounds almost silly right now, but I've got a feeling it won't for much longer. (Also, I would suspect it's Vancouver-based genre television that would be in the market for this before films.)