At some point special effects are going to peak and the 1 million dollar indie flick will look exactly like the 200 million dollar one.
There will still be other differences, but technology is going to go a long way towards leveling the playing field.
Hell, when computers can generate photo real actors, actors will just be people in mocap suits (except that we won't need mocap suits by then), and they won't even need to be attractive. Eventually one person will be able to create the equivalent of a Hollywood blockbuster.
There was an interesting interview with Ewan McGregor, where he described working on the Star Wars prequels as a total nightmare. He was in front of a green screen, sat on top of some wooden box (it was supposed to be an animal we was riding). As the box swayed from side to side, George Lucas yelled "Look at the moons!".
To which McGregor said "WHAT MOONS?". As an actor, he was so distanced from the scene that he was unable to perform to the best of his abilities. The output speaks for itself.
TL;DR: focusing solely on technology without thinking of the human factor is a bad idea.
But, I think you overestimate the quality of a Hollywood blockbuster.
Imagine if you put Steven Spielburg in front of a hypothetical movie machine. A machine that could automate everything down to the actors and voices, so all the director had to do was write the script, place everything, and direct all the action (yes I realize something like this is years away). I'd bet that he could produce a movie at least as good as the average summer blockbuster.
There are no shortcuts to that level of polish. Doesn't matter how advanced your rendering is, you still need an army of 3D artists. Makeup isn't going to be much cheaper just because you do it in Maya.
>Makeup isn't going to be much cheaper just because you do it in Maya.
They won't use Maya. Technology progresses, and tools become easier to use. At some point in the future you'll be able to select an actor, click makeup and adjust some sliders.
>you still need an army of 3D artists
For original creations you do need artists (the tools will continue to improve and make each artist more efficient), but there will come a time when all you'll need to do is take a few photos of tree, or a building to make an ultra high quality 3d model of it.
Indie movies will upload their back yard or buy stock trees, and it will show. That's what separates big budget from small budget - perfectionism and meticulous attention to the tiniest details. Computers doesn't understand beauty or emotion, so you need fine grained human control every step of the way.
It's the composition that is expensive and not the ability to perfectly reproduce reality.
It's the same as when a programmer will constantly re-factor their code to provide better abstractions or improve efficiency. Or when a designer spends hours deciding on how to a lay an interface out.
The tools to create generic copy-paste movies and music are already out there in the same way you can build a website by buying something from template monster and copy pasting a bunch of Javascript and PHP that you found on google around.
Of course tools will get better and make efficiency better but all that will do is raise the bar. People want to see movies that will wow them , either with better special effects than they have seen before or with clever/funny dialogue etc.
The people who have the skills to do this best will want to work for the big media companies because these are the ones who will open their wallets and pay them a good salary to do what they love all day with the best tools available.
That's were your wrong. Computers don't understand beauty, but given enough processing power, and sample data they can recreate it.
There's already a program that can listen to Beethoven and reproduce something that even experts can't tell he didn't write.
A movie example: In your movie creator you set up a scene with 2 people talking in a room. The computer has been trained with thousands of such scenes, so it automatically selects the best camera angles and allows the operator some manual control. That will happen at some point.
Also there are computer generated singing voices good enough to fool Japanese audiences.
With cost reduction of special effects, I agree that the playing field will gradually level...
...but to contradict myself a bit, perhaps it won't ever level because new technologies will continue to be introduced to improve the entertainment experience that are proprietary and therefore expensive.