Originally Posted by Nikki Finke, Deadline Hollywood

FRIDAY PM: Hollywood expected Inception to hold well in the large markets and on both coasts. But Salt definitely put some pepper into Friday's and this weekend's estimated box office, according to my sources using early numbers. And the other newcomer Ramona and Beezus joins an already crowded family film market. (Figures will be refined in the morning):

1. Chris Nolan's Inception for Warner Bros/Legendary Pictures will still be the No. 1 movie for its 2nd weekend in release. It went into today having made $100+M in the U.S. and Canada in just 7 days -- only the 5th film and the only original 2D movie to accomplish that. Inception made a big $14.4M Friday for a Superglue-like hold of 34% compared to a week ago for what's expected to be a $43M weekend and a new cume of $143M. Ah, what dreamy legs.

2. Sony Pictures set a new salary high for Angelina Jolie to star in this weekend's No. 2 movie Salt. Still, the studio was gobsmacked when she set about earning every penny, whether it was long autograph-signing sessions at the pic's premieres or making a much-hyped panel appearance at Comic-Con. That was just a few of the marketing moves Sony made to sell Salt but there were more by Jeff Blake and Marc Weinstock and their team: concocting a high-octane ad campaign, devising a 9-week episodic online game, junketeering in Washington DC with a reception/tour of the International Spy Museum, even exploiting that recent real-life Russian sleeper spy ring in the news because of its similarities to the movie plot. "The Anna Chapman story resulted in extensive off entertainment page coverage mentioning Salt," one Sony exec explained to me.

The Philip Noyce-directed pic had been tracking extremely well for weeks by garnering solid unaided awareness overall with total awareness strongest in older females and males, followed by younger males. (Younger females were a bit behind...) What other actress plays so well with both women and men? And she's also the only actress who can open a kickass actioner right now -- which is why the lead role intended for Tom Cruise underwent a sex change. And open SALT Jolie did with a $13.8M Friday and expected $37M weekend that could climb to $40M if there's a Saturday bump. With a supposed cost of only a little over $100M (Sony claims that's because of production incentives from shooting back East), the studio is confident it has a hit here and overseas. Salt is opening in a few territories over the next few days (i.e. Colombia, India, Egypt, Jordan, Aruba, Jamaica, etc) while next week it releases in countries like Russia, Korea, Japan and Brazil. The film will continue to roll out all over the world through October.

Originally Posted by Drexl

She must mean just for this year. 16 movies (not including Inception) have had opening weekends of $100 million plus, let alone that much in 7 days.

Originally Posted by Solid Snake PAC

seems like WB hit the billion mark for the year. Go WB....

Originally Posted by Dr. DVD

FWIW, I actually see Inception sticking around the top five for a while, maybe even into mid-September. My assistant went and saw this over the weekend and she never goes to movies, and she liked it a lot. I think word of mouth will keep this around longer than they average summer movie.