The Christmas of Avatar and Sherlock

What it was like working for minimum wage in a movie theater alongside the biggest movie of all-time.

10 years ago today, the biggest movie in the world was released. Technically now it’s the 2nd biggest movie in the world, but for the entire past decade, it went unchallenged.

A week before Christmas, James Cameron’s Avatar hit theaters worldwide. The adventure film set on the planet of Pandora had high expectations across the board. James Cameron was the Titanic guy, the Terminator guy. Everything he did wasn’t just big, but like, the biggest EVER. The trailers for Avatar were incredible looking, and 2009 was the absolute peak of the 3-D revival movement in big-budget movies. Plus, there was a lot of discussion around how Cameron had invented an entire camera system called the Fusion Camera System in order to shoot the film completely in stereoscopic 3D. People didn’t really know what Avatar was going to be about, but the word “epic” was being hopefully thrown around a lot that December.

During the 2009 Christmas season, I was working as Floor Staff at the Regal New…