Inception
2010 · 148 min
Directed by Christopher Nolan. Written by Christopher Nolan. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ken Watanabe, Tom Hardy.
A thief who steals corporate secrets through the use of dream-sharing technology is given the inverse task of planting an idea into the mind of a CEO, but his tragic past may doom the project and his team to disaster.
Critics 86% · audiences 91% · $293 million in the US and Canada on its first run · $536 million elsewhere · about 37 million tickets sold, 12% of the country · 8 Oscar nominations, 4 won
What they said about Inception
- 2010
applying a vivid sense of procedural detail to a fiendishly intricate yarn set in the labyrinth of the unconscious mind, the writer-director has devised a heist thriller for surrealists, a Jungian's Rififi, that challenges viewers to sift through multiple layers of (un)reality.
— Justin Chang, Variety - 2010
is all about process, about fighting our way through enveloping sheets of reality and dream, reality within dreams, dreams without reality. It's a breathtaking juggling act.
— Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times - 2010
I found myself wishing Inception were weirder, further out the film is Nolan's labyrinth all the way, and it's gratifying to experience a summer movie with large visual ambitions and with nothing more or less on its mind than (as Shakespeare said) a dream that hath no bottom.
— Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune - 2010
the best of traditional and modern film making. If you're searching for smart and nervy popular entertainment, this is what it looks like.
— Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times - 2010
regards his viewers as possibly smarter than they are—or at least as capable of rising to his inventive level. That's a tall order. But it's refreshing to find a director who makes us stretch, even occasionally struggle, to keep up.
— Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times - 2010
there is a lot to see in Inception, there is nothing that counts as genuine vision. Mr. Nolan's idea of the mind is too literal, too logical, and too rule-bound to allow the full measure of madness.
— Scott, The New York Times
How it got made
Initially, Christopher Nolan wrote an 80-page treatment about dream-stealers. Nolan had originally envisioned Inception as a horror film, but eventually wrote it as a heist film even though he found that "traditionally [they] are very deliberately superficial in emotional terms." Upon revisiting his script, he decided that basing it in that genre did not work because the story "relies so heavily on the idea of the interior state, the idea of dream and memory. I realized I needed to raise the emotional stakes."
Nolan worked on the script for nine to ten years. When he first started thinking about making the film, Nolan was influenced by "that era of movies where you had The Matrix (1999), you had Dark City (1998), you had The Thirteenth Floor (1999) and, to a certain extent, you had Memento (2000), too. They were based in the principles that the world around you might not be real."
Nolan first pitched the film to Warner Bros. in 2001, but decided that he needed more experience making large-scale films and embarked on Batman Begins (2005) and The Dark Knight (2008). He soon realized that a film like Inception needed a large budget because "as soon as you're talking about dreams, the potential of the human mind is infinite. And so the scale of the film has to feel infinite. It has to feel like you could go anywhere by the end of the film. And it has to work on a massive scale." After making The Dark Knight, Nolan decided to make Inception and spent six months completing the script. Nolan said that the key to completing the script was wondering what would happen if several people shared the same dream. "Once you remove the privacy, you've created an infinite number of alternative universes in which people can meaningfully interact, with validity, with weight, with dramatic consequences."
At the 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. Inceptions 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.
Afterwards
Numerous pop and hip hop songs reference the film, including Common's "Blue Sky", N.E.R.D.'s "Hypnotize U", XV's "The Kick", Black Eyed Peas' "Just Can't Get Enough", Lil Wayne's "6 Foot 7 Foot", Jennifer Lopez's "On the Floor", and B.o.B's "Strange Clouds", while T.I. had Inception-based artwork on two of his mix-tapes. An instrumental track by Joe Budden is titled "Inception". The animated series South Park parodies the film in the show's tenth episode of its fourteenth season, titled "Insheeption". The film was also an influence for Ariana Grande's video for "No Tears Left to Cry". "Lawnmower Dog", the second episode of the animated comedy show Rick and Morty, parodied the film. In an episode of The Simpsons, named "How I Wet Your Mother", the plot spoofs Inception with various scenes parodying moments from the film. The showrunners of the television series The Flash said its season 4 finale was inspired by Inception. In February 2020, American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift released a lyric video for her single "The Man", which featured visuals bearing resemblance to the film. The song also mentions DiCaprio in its lyrics. Kpop boy group Ateez, also released a song titled "Inception" in 2020, serving as their title track for their fifth EP, Zero: Fever Part.1. The song is heavily inspired by Nolan's film, with the concept, music video and lyrics containing references to core concepts of "dream in a dream" and distorted realities that are present in the film.
The film's title has been colloquialized as the word inception and the splinter suffix -ception, which refer to layering, nesting, or recursion, in reference to the movie's key element of a "dream within a dream". The normal meaning of inception is 'beginning', and the title refers to causing the inception of an idea within someone's mind.