Programmatically displaying a view into a colorbox
Put your view into a div with a wrapper that is hidden (ie, display:none;). Then you can use the following javascript:

$.colorbox({
    'inline' : true,
    'href' : $('.views-view-my-view'),
});


You must replace the 'href' attribute with the appropriate jQuery collection representing your view. Other customisations to the way your colorbox appears can be found here.

If you need some advice on placing a view on your page, here is a clean implementation:

function MODULE_preprocess_page(&amp;$vars) {
  $vars['page']['bottom']['my_view'] = array(
    '#type' =&gt; 'container',
    '#attributes' =&gt; array(
      'id' =&gt; 'my-view-container',
    ),
    'children' =&gt; array(
      '#markup' =&gt; views_embed_view(...),
    ),
  );
}


In this case your selector for colorbox would be #my-view-container .view