Inception is a 2010 American science fiction-action film written, produced, and directed by Christopher Nolan and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Ken Watanabe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page, Marion Cotillard, and Cillian Murphy. The film is inspired by the experience of lucid dreaming. The film, a variant on the heist genre, centers on Dom Cobb, an "extractor", who enters the dreams of others to obtain information that is otherwise inaccessible. His abilities and questions about the death of his wife have cost him his family and his nationality, but he is promised a chance to regain his old life in exchange for planting an idea in a corporate target's mind. This process of planting an idea, known as "inception", is less familiar and far more difficult than Cobb's usual job of "extraction".
Development of Inception began roughly ten years before the film's actual release when Nolan wrote an 80-page treatment about dream-stealers. After presenting the idea to Warner Bros. in 2001, he felt that he needed to have more experience with large scale films. Therefore, Nolan opted to work on Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. He spent six months polishing up the film's script before Warner Bros. purchased it in February 2009. Filming began in Tokyo on June 19, 2009 and finished in Canada in late November of the same year.
Inception was officially budgeted at $160 million, a cost which was split between Warner Bros. and Legendary Pictures. Nolan's reputation and success with The Dark Knight helped secure the film $100 million in advertising expenditure. Inception premiered in London on July 13, 2010 and was released in both conventional and IMAX theatres on July 16, 2010. The film grossed over $21 million on its opening day, with an opening weekend gross of $62.7 million. The film received mostly positive reviews.
