The fact of the matter is that pay for play isn't really going anywhere, and it turns out that the vast majority of piracy is a convenience thing as opposed to an unwillingness to pay thing.
Steam, for example, has been a very effective methodology to combat piracy. All you have to do is to make it roughly as easy to acquire media legitimately as it is to get it illegally and the vast majority of people would buy it that way. Some of the current distribution networks are doomed and some of the price points and delivery methods are no longer correct, but there's absolutely nothing to suggest that there isn't an answer to the problem.
Crowdfunding doesn't actually have any advantages over producers. Instead of taking the cost of production from a smaller number of people you're taking it from a slightly larger number of people. That's it. You're not going to be getting more money. You're not going to be able pay crew or actors better. You're not going to be able to make better quality films. You're not going to convince people who wouldn't pay for it in theaters to pre-purchase the movie. You aren't going to make it harder for pirates to pirate. You aren't going to get the people who currently pirate the movies to not pirate the movies as a result of changing the funding structure. All you are doing is injecting a massive amount of uncertainty and the very really possibility of funding falling through to the very beginning of the process. Just look at the "early access" system, and how badly that serves all but a certain class of game.
More generally you aren't going to be making movies that a lot of people want to see. You are only going to have movies that an organized fan base wants to see. Think about it, if 100,000 little girls want a My Little Pony movie it'll never get made. Little girls don't have money and even if they could get their parents to pony up (heh) they don't have the nationwide (global?) organization to find the script, find the performers, find the director, and find the technical staff. Even if Hasbro did that stuff for them, they still wouldn't be able to reach out to one another to make each other aware that the project even exists. If 100,000,000 people sort of want to see SPACE EXPLOSIONS: THE MOVIE, they'll never get it made because organizing the funding effort would be functionally impossible. Let's face it, no one absolutely, positively has to see that movie, but a lot of people would enjoy watching that movie. Why would they go out and really look for something that they only sort-of want to see? Why would they prepay something that might suck and they can't trust? But 100,000 fans of a book probably could get the movie made regardless of whether even 1 only person wants to see it. I'm not saying that the selection process today is particularly good, but at least today people sometimes take a chance on something new. Crowdsourcing would require convincing thousands of people to take a chance of something risky instead of only a couple dozen.