system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Why are realistic CGI movies so expensive to produce?

Why do movies like avatar, where it's heavily CGI'ed, cost so much to produce? It's much more expensive than movies that use physical props. Where do the chunk of the budget go into? Animators? Actors?
gpt
As with most things expensive; it's difficult, it takes time and it requires a lot of resources.

For one scene of CGI it might be months of work behind it, with everything from motion capture actors (so you need to do everything you would need to actually film the scene but with even more things needed than normal), scrubbing of the motion capture data, creating all the 3D models, painting or creating textures and mattes, staging it over and over again until it's to everybody's liking, hours of rendering and then painstakingly handcrafted finishing polish to create the last touches.