Inception

Inception is a 2010 science fiction heist film written and directed by Christopher Nolan, who also produced it with his wife Emma Thomas. The film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as a professional thief who steals information by infiltrating his targets' subconscious. He is offered a chance to have his criminal history erased as payment for implanting an idea into a target's subconscious. The ensemble cast includes Ken Watanabe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cotillard, Elliot Page, Tom Hardy, Cillian Murphy, Tom Berenger, Dileep Rao, and Michael Caine. After the completion of Insomnia in 2002, Nolan presented to Warner Bros. a written 80-page treatment for a horror film envisioning "dream stealers", based on lucid dreaming. Deciding he needed more experience before tackling a production of this magnitude and complexity, Nolan shelved the project and instead worked on Batman Begins (2005), The Prestige (2006), and The Dark Knight (2008). The treatment was revised over six months and was purchased by Warner Bros. in February 2009. Inception was filmed in six countries, beginning in Tokyo on June 19 and ending in Canada on November 22. Its official budget was US$160 million, split between Warner Bros. and Legendary. Nolan's reputation and success with The Dark Knight helped secure the film's $100 million in advertising expenditure.…

Inception is a 2010 science fiction heist film written and directed by Christopher Nolan, who also produced it with his wife Emma Thomas. The film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as a professional thief who steals information by infiltrating his targets' subconscious. He is offered a chance to have his criminal history erased as payment for implanting an idea into a target's subconscious. The ensemble cast includes Ken Watanabe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cotillard, Elliot Page, Tom Hardy, Cillian Murphy, Tom Berenger, Dileep Rao, and Michael Caine. After the completion of Insomnia in 2002, Nolan presented to Warner Bros. a written 80-page treatment for a horror film envisioning "dream stealers", based on lucid dreaming. Deciding he needed more experience before tackling a production of this magnitude and complexity, Nolan shelved the project and instead worked on Batman Begins (2005), The Prestige (2006), and The Dark Knight (2008). The treatment was revised over six months and was purchased by Warner Bros. in February 2009. Inception was filmed in six countries, beginning in Tokyo on June 19 and ending in Canada on November 22. Its official budget was US$160 million, split between Warner Bros. and Legendary. Nolan's reputation and success with The Dark Knight helped secure the film's $100 million in advertising expenditure. Inception s premiere was held in London on July 8, 2010; it was released in both conventional and IMAX theaters beginning on July 16, 2010. Inception grossed $839 million worldwide, becoming the fourth-highest-grossing film of 2010. Considered one of the best films of the 2010s, Inception, among its numerous accolades, won four Oscars (Best Cinematography, Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing, Best Visual Effects) and was nominated for four more (Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay, Best Art Direction, Best Original Score) at the 83rd Academy Awards. In 2025, the Library of Congress selected Inception for preservation in the United States National Film Registry for being "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant". are incorporated into the film as an example of the impossible objects that can be created in lucid dream worlds.|alt=A staircase in a square format. The stairs make four 90-degree turns in each corner, so they are in the format of a continuous loop. In Inception, Nolan wanted to explore "the idea of people sharing a dream space... That gives you the ability to access somebody's unconscious mind. What would that be used and abused for?" The majority of the film's plot takes place in these interconnected dream worlds. This structure creates a framework where actions in the real or dream worlds ripple across others. The dream is always in a state of production, and shifts across the levels as the characters navigate it. By contrast, the world of The Matrix (1999) is an authoritarian, computer-controlled one, alluding to theories of social control developed by thinkers Michel Foucault and Jean Baudrillard. However, according to one interpretation Nolan's world has more in common with the works of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. David Denby in The New Yorker compared Nolan's cinematic treatment of dreams to Luis Buñuel's in Belle de Jour (1967) and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972). He criticized Nolan's "literal-minded" action level sequencing compared to Buñuel, who "silently pushed us into reveries and left us alone to enjoy our wonderment, but Nolan is working on so many levels of representation at once that he has to lay in pages of dialogue just to explain what's going on." The latter captures "the peculiar malign intensity of actual dreams." Deirdre Barrett, a dream researcher at Harvard University, said that Nolan did not get every detail accurate regarding dreams, but their illogical, rambling, disjointed plots would not make for a great thriller anyway. However, "he did get many aspects right," she said, citing the scene in which a sleeping Cobb is shoved into a full bath, and in the dream world water gushes into the windows of the building, waking him up. "That's very much how real stimuli get incorporated, and you very often wake up right after that intrusion." Nolan himself said, "I tried to work that idea of manipulation and management of a conscious dream being a skill that these people have. Really the script is based on those common, very basic experiences and concepts, and where can those take you? And the only outlandish idea that the film presents, really, is the existence of a technology that allows you to enter and share the same dream as someone else." === Box office === Inception was released in both conventional and IMAX theaters on July 16, 2010. The film had its world premiere at Leicester Square in London on July 8, 2010. In the United States and Canada, Inception was released theatrically in 3,792 conventional theaters and 195 IMAX theaters. The film grossed US$21.8 million during its opening day on July 16, 2010, with midnight screenings in 1,500 locations. Overall the film made US$62.7 million and debuted at No.1 on its opening weekend. Inception s opening weekend gross made it the second-highest-grossing debut for a science fiction film that was not a sequel, remake or adaptation, behind Avatars US$77 million opening-weekend gross in 2009. The film held the top spot of the box office rankings in its second and third weekends, with drops of just 32% (US$42.7 million) and 36% (US$27.5 million), respectively, before dropping to second place in its fourth week, behind The Other Guys. Inception initially grossed US$292 million in the United States and Canada, US$56 million in the United Kingdom, Ireland and Malta and US$479 million in other countries for a total of US$828 million worldwide. Its five highest-grossing markets after the US and Canada (US$292 million) were China (US$68 million), the United Kingdom, Ireland and Malta (US$56 million), France and the Maghreb region (US$43 million), Japan (US$40 million) and South Korea (US$38 million). It was the sixth-highest-grossing film of 2010 in North America, and the fourth-highest-grossing film of 2010, behind Toy Story 3, Alice in Wonderland and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1. Its subsequent re-releases increased its gross to US$839 million. Inception is the fourth most lucrative production in Christopher Nolan's career—behind The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises and Oppenheimer —and the second most for Leonardo DiCaprio—behind Titanic. ===Top ten lists=== Inception was listed on many critics' lists of top ten movies for 2010. 1st – Richard Roeper, Chicago Sun-Times 1st – Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times (tied with The Social Network and Toy Story 3) 1st – Tasha Robinson, The A.V. Club 1st – Empire 1st – Kirk Honeycutt, The Hollywood Reporter 2nd – Peter Travers, Rolling Stone 2nd – Christy Lemire, Associated Press 2nd – Gregory Ellwood, HitFix 2nd – Lisa Kennedy, Denver Post 2nd – Bill Goodykoontz, Arizona Republic 3rd – Stephen Holden, The New York Times 3rd – Phillip French, The Observer 3rd – FX Feeney, The Village Voice 4th – Keith Phipps, The A.V. Club 5th – Nathan Rabin, The A.V. Club 5th – Lou Lumenick, New York Post 6th – Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times 6th – Elizabeth Weitzman, New York Daily News 6th – Ann Hornaday, Washington Post 6th – Caryn James, Indiewire 6th – Claudia Puig, USA Today 6th – David Germain, Associated Press 6th – Rene Rodriguez, Miami Herald 7th – Noel Murray, The A.V. Club 8th – Mike Scott, The Times-Picayune 9th – Drew McWeeny, HitFix 10th – J. Hoberman, The Village Voice 10th – Peter Hartlaub, San Francisco Chronicle In March 2011, the film was voted by BBC Radio 1 and BBC Radio 1Xtra listeners as their ninth-favorite film of all time. Producer Roger Corman cited Inception as an example of "great imagination and originality". In 2012, Inception was ranked the 35th-best-edited film of all time by the Motion Picture Editors Guild. In the same year, Total Film named it the most rewatchable movie of all time. In 2014, Empire ranked Inception the tenth-greatest film ever made on their list of "The 301 Greatest Movies Of All Time" as voted by the magazine's readers, while Rolling Stone magazine named it the second-best science fiction film since the turn of the century. Inception was ranked 84th on Hollywood's 100 Favorite Films, a list compiled by The Hollywood Reporter in 2014, surveying "Studio chiefs, Oscar winners and TV royalty". In 2016, Inception was voted the 51st-best film of the 21st Century by BBC, as picked by 177 film critics from around the world. The film was included in the Visual Effects Society's list of "The Most Influential Visual Effects Films of All Time". In 2019, Total Film named Inception the best film of the 2010s. Many critics and media outlets included Inception in their rankings of the best films of the 2010s. The film was included in Forbes magazine's list of Top 150 Greatest Films of 21st Century. In April 2014, The Daily Telegraph placed the title on its top ten list of the most overrated films. Telegraph s Tim Robey stated, "It's a criminal failing of the movie that it purports to be about people's dreams being invaded, but demonstrates no instinct at all for what a dream has ever felt like, and no flair for making us feel like we're in one, at any point." The film won an informal poll by the Los Angeles Times as the most overrated movie of 2010. In 2021, members¹ of Writers Guild of America West (WGAW) and Writers Guild of America, East (WGAE) ranked its screenplay 37th in WGA's 101 Greatest Screenplays of the 21st Century (So Far). In 2026, Inception was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

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