To be fair, honestly, only pre-conceptualizations of the story board were done in blender because it was what the artist used. All of what you actually see in the movie was done in maya.

I've used both 3dsmax and blender. I now use blender all the time, I love the hotkeys, i can just stick my 3d view fullscreen and play away, albiet I am not a very good modeller, i'm more of a programmer.

Hey
There are many 3d softwares which I see are not considered in this thread. Well 3dmax and Maya are great softwares indeed ,but Lightwave and Cinema 4d are also nothing less. There is always a hype that this is better than that. But the fact is that these softwares are just a tool to make 3d. They are made from code libraries just like game engins are made. There are so many game engins spinning around with this world!
Another thing, Lets not judge these softwares by what movie they were used in because for everyone of these softwares there are many movies to be named after.Speaking of movies , i thing you guys are refering to those special effects well as a matter of factly if there is a special effect in a movie that was never seen before then that specific special effect most probably was coded or engineeared.
lastly these are just a tools , you may never know what comes up, by the time you are learning a 3d app something new will come up.When I learnt max and Maya was called the next!
my 2 cents (hehe)