LOS ANGELES (AP) — Leonardo DiCaprio’s Inception has won a battle of superstar action thrillers over Angelina Jolie’s Salt at the weekend box office.

Inception remained the No 1 movie for the second-straight weekend with $43.5 million, according to studio estimates yesterday. The Warner Bros thriller, featuring DiCaprio as leader of a team that sneaks into people’s dreams, raised its 10-day total to $143.7 million.

Sony’s spy caper Salt debuted a solid No 2 with $36.5 million. The movie stars Jolie as a CIA operative who goes rogue after she’s accused of being a Russian sleeper agent.

Coming in at No 3 with $24.1 million was Steve Carell’s family hit Despicable Me. The animated comedy raised its domestic total to $161.7 million.

In a rare convergence of fresh ideas, the top three movies were all original stories, not sequels or adaptations of comic books, best-sellers, video games or other pre-existing material.

The weekend’s other new wide release, 20th Century Fox’s family comedy Ramona and Beezus, took in $8 million to finish at No 6. The movie is based on Beverly Cleary’s children’s books about a teenage girl and her accident-prone little sister.

Inception hung in strongly in its second weekend, its total down just 31 per cent from its $62.8 million opening. During the busy summer, top hits often drop 50 per cent or more in the second weekend and rarely repeat as the No 1 movie.

The film will quickly shoot past the $200 million mark at the domestic box office and has a good shot at topping $300 million, said Dan Fellman, head of distribution at Warner Bros.

Repeat business is accounting for a good share of Inception revenues as fans return to delve deeper into the labyrinthine story concocted by writer-director Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight).

While young males usually make up the bulk of the action audience, women and older crowds were the core fans of Jolie’s Salt. Females accounted for 53 per cent of viewers, while 59 per cent of the audience was older than 25, according to Sony.

Overall revenues rose for the fourth-straight weekend as Hollywood continued to recover from a box-office swoon earlier in the summer. Receipts totaled $164 million, up 11 per cent from the same weekend last year, when G-Force was No 1 with $31.7 million.

Revenues this season are at $3 billion, about three per cent ahead of the record pace of summer 2009. But accounting for higher ticket prices, movie attendance is down 3.4 per cent compared to last summer’s, according to Hollywood.com.

Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at US and Canadian theatres, according to Hollywood.com. Final figures will be released today.

1. Inception, $43.5 million.

2. Salt, $36.5 million.

3. Despicable Me, $24.1 million.

4. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,

$9.7 million.

5. Toy Story 3, $9 million.

6. Ramona and Beezus, $8 million.

7. Grown Ups, $7.6 million.

8. The Twilight Saga: Eclipse, $7 million.

9. The Last Airbender, $4.2 million.

10. Predators, $2.9 million.