Having made films for quite some time, aiming to outdo Hollywood rather than work within it - there's a lot less bloat than it may initially appear, and they're better at this stuff than they look from the outside.
Films are hugely labour-intensive, particularly to produce to the standards that the public demand. There are a variety of interesting avenues to pursue if you are interested in disrupting Hollywood - I blog about many of them when I'm not actively pursuing them - but none of them are trivial.
As for CGI realism: ish. I actually moved away from CGI to live-action quite recently, after nearly 20 years of making low-budget animated movies, because IMO live-action is actually far more promising right now. CGI is extremely useful as a backup and emabler in conjunction with live-action, but not so much on its own. I wrote more about that here - http://www.strangecompany.org/why-the-guy-who-coined-machini... .
Films are hugely labour-intensive, particularly to produce to the standards that the public demand. There are a variety of interesting avenues to pursue if you are interested in disrupting Hollywood - I blog about many of them when I'm not actively pursuing them - but none of them are trivial.
As for CGI realism: ish. I actually moved away from CGI to live-action quite recently, after nearly 20 years of making low-budget animated movies, because IMO live-action is actually far more promising right now. CGI is extremely useful as a backup and emabler in conjunction with live-action, but not so much on its own. I wrote more about that here - http://www.strangecompany.org/why-the-guy-who-coined-machini... .