Box Office: Inception Gets an Immaculate Reception

Christopher Nolan's dream came true. Inception, the writer-director's deviously complicated action-adventure movie, more than satisfied Nolan's and Warner Bros.' expectations by earning $60.4 million, according to early estimates, and winning the weekend at North American theaters. Leonardo DiCaprio, whose team of psyche-spies goes on a fantastic voyage to invade a rich man's sleep, also enjoyed his strongest opening weekend; Inception beat this February's Shutter Island by almost $20 million. (It did much better than Titanic too, even factoring inflation.)

This is one of the rare instances of a movie studio spending a bundle — Inception's budget was announced as $160 million, but IndieWire's Todd McCarthy, ex of Variety, pegs it at $200 million — on a filmmaker's intellectually ambitious, potential alienating dream project. The picture attracted audiences who knew little about the film except that: 1) DiCaprio was in it; 2) the guy who made The Dark Knight was the director; and 3) the idea behind it (just think, a Hollywood movie with an idea!) was hard to describe. Warners' stealthy marketing campaign mimicked Inception's plot: it planted a vague but attractive idea in the minds of moviegoers, leading many to say about the film, "I don't know what it is, but I have to see it." So they went.

Whether they'll keep going depends on what you mean by "they." CinemaScore's instant poll of audiences leaving the theater was divided pretty starkly by age. Parse the movie's mildly positive B-plus rating, and you find that the under-25s awarded it an A-minus, the 25-and-overs a B-minus — which on CinemaScore's generous bell curve is nearly a failing grade. (Last summer's aggressively reviled Sacha Baron Cohen comedy Bruno pulled a C.) But high-school and college kids are the ones who devote the biggest slice of their money to movies (older folks having to pay for food, shelter and their kids' tuition), and they may well return to Inception, if only to figure out what it's all about. The film, though not in 3-D, is scheduled to play in many of the high-priced IMAX theaters for the rest of the summer. So even with its burly opening, the forecast for the Inception's ultimate status — as a super-hit or a luke-warm finisher — remains as iffy as the resolution of Nolan's plot.

While Leo roared, Nic Cage snored. As the 1,500-year-old wizard in the kid-friendly action-adventure The Sorcerer's Apprentice, Cage stumbled to his leanest opening in any of the seven films in which he's starred for producer Jerry Bruckheimer, including National Treasure, Gone in Sixty Seconds and Con Air, but dating back to The Rock in 1996. Curious fact: The Sorcerer's Apprentice received the same overall B-plus CinemaScore rating as Inception did. But the poll only tracks moviegoers leaving the theater, and Apprentice didn't lure enough of them in.

Another star of the '90s, Adam Sandler, held onto his core audience, as Grown Ups, in its fourth week, saw the smallest drop among the holdover films in this weekend's top 10. Now at $129.6 million, the picture should within the week pass Click and Anger Management, Sandler's high-grossing comedies of the past decade, though it'll have to go a ways to get near the $160 million or so earned by his late-'90s The Waterboy and Big Daddy, which in real dollars both earned more than $200 million.

If there's a signature summer flop for a male star in his 40s, it'd have to be Tom Cruise's Knight and Day. In its fourth week in domestic theaters, the expensive action comedy has still not hit the $70 million mark. Bruckheimer's Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, starring Jake Gyllenhaal of considerably dimmer star wattage than Cruise's, was judged a box-office failure for earning just $89.2 million in North America, yet that film has picked up almost a quarter-billion dollars in foreign markets. The Russell Crowe Robin Hood, with a disappointing $104.8 million at home, took in nearly twice that abroad. The Cruise vehicle (in fewer countries so far, we grant) has taken in less than $40 million outside North America. Poor Tom Terrific — they don't want to see him here or there. Cruise's only consolation: he's not Mel Gibson.

In indie action, the critical darling The Kids Are All Right earned $1 million in just 38 venues, for a Lilliputian-Brobdingnagian $27,000 per-screen average. Cyrus, which had been wowing 'em in limited release, doubled the number of screens, to more than 400, but actually saw its weekend revenue drop; maybe this dark comedy was just a big-city thing. The Girl Who Played With Fire, the second Swedish-language film based on Stieg Larsson's "Millennium" best-sellers, hit the $2 million mark in just 10 days of release. And the Oscar-winning Argentine thriller The Secret in Their Eyes, now in its 14th week, passed $6 million. That's just a tenth of what Inception will have earned in three days, but it means a lot to the little people.

Here are the Sunday estimates of this weekend's top-grossing pictures in North American theaters, as reported by Box Office Mojo:

1. Inception, $60.4 million, first weekend
2. Despicable Me, $32.7 million; $118.4 million, second week
3. The Sorcerer's Apprentice, $17.4 million; $24.5 million, first five days
4. The Twilight Saga: Eclipse, $13.5 million; $264.9 million, third week
5. Toy Story 3, $11.7 million; $362.7 million, fifth week
6. Grown Ups, $10 million; $129.3 million, fourth week < br > 7. The Last Airbender, $7.45 million; $114.8 million, third week < br > 8. Predators, $6.8 million; $40.1 million, second week < br > 9. Knight and Day, $3.7 million; $69.2 million, fourth week
10. The Karate Kid, $2.2 million; $169.2 million, sixth week