User blog comment:Squidzo's meat house/Subnautica Natural Selection 2/@comment-205.121.16.2-20160225202432

Well, in the movie Monsters vs. Aliens, the cow that they pull away in the sequence where Ginormica is being moved on the platform is the same cow in the Bee Movie. Illuminaynay confirmeded!

...I honestly think that, most of the time, developers of the movie, videogame genres use assets and designs that are similar for different project simply because they don't want to go and make whole new stuff for each and every new movie. If you read the commentary subtitles while watching movies (like I do), you would soon see that about 20% of every movie is assets, sounds, environments, effects, etc. that are identical to ones used in previous movies made by the same people. So, maybe your theory is right, but I'm willing to bet that that being the case is not intentional from the developer's perspective(s).