Recreating Marilyn Monroe's Home in Unreal Engine for a New FOX & TMZ Investigation

More than sixty years after Marilyn Monroe died in her Brentwood home, the questions about that night still haven’t gone away. A new FOX and TMZ investigation takes them on. And to do it, the producers needed something no one has had before: the house itself, rebuilt exactly as it was, in a form investigators could actually move through.

We collaborated on the build. L.A. Castle Studios worked alongside the production’s Unreal Engine artists, helping recreate Monroe’s home as a navigable, photoreal digital twin. The rooms, the hallways, and the sightlines reconstructed to scale, so investigators could walk the space, test what was and wasn’t possible, and weigh the theories against the architecture itself.

Why rebuild a house to investigate it?

The home where Monroe died is a private residence today. You can’t bring a team of investigators through it, re-stage a night from 1962, or test a theory by standing where someone is said to have stood. And even if you could, you’d get one walkthrough, in one lighting condition, from one point of view.

A virtual recreation removes that friction entirely. Once the house exists in Unreal Engine, it’s available on demand, any room, any hour of the night, any vantage point, repeated as many times as the investigation needs. It’s the difference between describing a space and standing in it.

A new use for virtual production

Much of the work that comes through our stages is scripted and fictional: film, television, commercials. This is something different: virtual production in service of a real investigation, and it shows how far the same real-time tools now reach. A photoreal, navigable recreation isn’t only a backdrop to shoot against; it’s a place to examine, measure, and reason about.

It also makes for striking television. The recreation anchors the series visually, giving viewers a way into a story they think they already know.

Watch it on FOX: June 21

The special is a joint FOX and TMZ production, premiering on FOX on June 21. The trailer is above.

If you have a production, scripted, documentary, or investigative, that needs a real place rebuilt accurately and run in real time on our CastleVision stage, that’s exactly what we do: see how we recreate a real location for filming, browse the true-crime recreations and reunion specials shot here, book a studio tour, or see more of the work.