Prometheus

[crisosphinx]

Guys, CGI is not expensive. It is time consuming which means you need to hire a bunch of people to spend hours and hours modeling but it doesn't take any longer than making an actual custom puppet/prop/whatever and with those you need to spend money (sometimes a lot of money) buying materials. When the licenses and salaries have been paid, CGI is practically free. If you made a Bayish Transformers movie only with animatronics and practical effects in the same scope, the budget would have probably been a billion dollars or more. So if you think about it CGI is much cheaper, it's just that more things are possible which makes some people get overambitious.

But as a result, you still admit that CGI is expensive. Only a couple people would have to work on animatronics and puppets. A couple people vs a ton of people. CGI is in fact expensive and in this current day and age, it's where at least a third of the entire movies budget goes. Let's say you have 600 people on the movie, maybe 100 of them are working on CGI.. Normally, CGI will be the first thing a ton of the money will go towards (CGI meaning color correction, 3D, animation, film compositing, background art [matte painting], texturing, etc).