Digitization should be reducing the costs of movies not increasing it!!!!!
You obviously don’t grasp the man hours that go into every frame of cgi. I can’t fathom how it could possibly be cheaper.
You would think so, but the amount of computer graphics that are crammed into movies seems to require an army of SFX people each working on one particular aspect of the film. Some people are only doing backgrounds, some people are only doing one particular scene, meanwhile, there is the team that creates the SFX monsters and then hands off the 3D effect to the compositors, who add the 3D effect to the scene so that it interacts with the human actors. Lots of unnecessary bloat and self-important visual effects artists who want free healthcare and to destroy capitalism, yet they still want to be highly paid, and work 30 hours a week.
Digital effects, especially with digitally animated movies like Toy Story or movies like John Carter that have so many effects that they might as well be an animated movie, require huge investments of cash. You have to pay a very large number of extremely talented people large amounts of money to design very time consuming effects using very expensive machines and technology. The process from start to finish is several years, not months like shooting a traditional film.
Also, if you're using top voice talent as well like most animated and effects driven movies do, you have to fork over big bucks to them too. It's exponentially cheaper to pay Willem Dafoe to stand in front of the camera in a costume and act than to pay him to voice act for a digital character that takes dozens of people months to design and days per second of film to render and complete.
Digital effects take much longer hence their greater cost. Digital effects require a lot of very gifted people working for long periods of time, and they don't come cheap.