288 hours means it takes 17,280,000ms to render one frame of footage. To render one on-screen frame of a game running at 60FPS you have 16.6ms to render the frame. This is a difference of about 2^20, or twenty doublings in speed.
Assuming CPU power can be doubled every 18 months, which still seems to be the case even if the power of individual cores is not increasing as quickly as it used to be, then you're looking at 18 times 20 months, or 360 months. This is fifteen years.
It's also the case that today's systems have a lot more than one CPU. If you take a consumer system that already has four cores and a GPU to boost performance even further, that could shave two to five years off the time.
So it took close to a year to render each second on-screen. I do not believe this.
Divide that by a large number of CPUs.
Most rendering is very parallelizable.
[1] http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/transformers-dark-moon...
That means in a month you can deliver 30 seconds of footage. If you have a five minute sequence, get ten racks like that and you can turn it around inside a month.
Also, since when is 288 hours even close to a year?
Pretty close but the assumption that you'd be using a single CPU is wrong.
Take Transformers 3 for example: "It took 288 hours PER FRAME to render the Driller along with the photo-real CG building that includes all those reflections in its glass."
Less complicated scenes in Pixar films take hours to render just ONE frame, which is why they do it using thousands of powerful computers at render farms working together.
And even then, you can tell the scene is CG.
Maybe in 50 years when we all have the power of a render farm in our graphics cards we'll be able to, but even then. It's just not worth the cost of development. Storing massive textures like that would require an insane amount of hard drive space. Creating textures like, physics engines, character models, worlds, lighting, etc... would exponentially multiply the cost of cost of game development to a point that it's just not worth it.
Is it possible? YES. Is it feasible? NO. Why? Because being able to render a photo-realistic scene with humans in it means being able to develop a game with photo-realistic scenes without the studio going bankrupt.