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The Orphanage is Spain's official nominee for the Academy Awards, and jumps into 707 theaters this weekend. A supernatural thriller, it centers on a woman who turns the house that she was raised in into a home for orphans. Dark secrets await her there, and the house appears to be testing and taunting her and her son with psychological tricks.

The Orphanage is drawing comparisons to last year's Pan's Labyrinth, with its rich fantasy world and gorgeous design, as well as its shocking scares. It's earned about $1 million in very limited release, but could start to build some momentum. I predict about $2 million for it this weekend.

Among returning films, Juno continues to roll along, having moved up into second place with a true national release. The teen pregnancy comedy earned almost $16 million last weekend, pushing its total to over $50 million. After the moderate success of Thank You For Smoking in 2006, Jason Reitman has a legitimate hit on his hands with this film. It adds another 500 or so theaters this weekend, and will be competing with The Bucket List and First Sunday for first place on the weekend, though I think it falls just short, with about $12 million.

National Treasure: Book of Secrets will yield its top spot at the box office after three weekends and $175 million. It's essentially tied with the gross of the first National Treasure film, but still has a few weekends of life left in it, and should wind up with about $220 million when the final bell tolls. Nic Cage's career lives again for another day. Give it about $12 million this weekend.

I Am Legend and Alvin and the Chipmunks essentially tied for third place with about $15 million last weekend, but Alvin finally started to show some weakness with the end of the holidays. It's still going to be the number one family choice of the weekend, with around $9 million, and about $225 million total, meaning studio executives will start mining just about every novelty craze there ever was for story ideas. Get ready for Rubik's Cube: The Movie. I Am Legend should see about $9 million as well, and could hit $260 million total when all is said and done.

J-horror knock-off One Missed Call was a bit of a surprise at $12.5 million for its debut. The formula for which low-budget generic horror film is going to take off seems to be constantly changing, and while this doesn't represent a massive hit, this style of horror had seemed to be basically over to me. But, I guess if you have freaky enough imagery, you can sell just about anything to teens. I expect this to crash to about $6 million in its second weekend.

Forecast: Weekend of January 11-13, 2008
Rank	Film	Number of Sites	Changes in Sites from Last	Estimated Gross ($)
1	The Bucket List	2,911	+2,898	13.6
2	Juno	2,448	+523	12.8
3	First Sunday	2,213	New	12.2
4	National Treasure 2	3,377	-385	12.0
5	I Am Legend	3,353	-295	9.4
6	Alvin and the Chipmunks	3,384	-78	8.8
7	The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything	1,336	New	6.9
8	One Missed Call	2,240	0	6.2
9	In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Movie	1,605	New	5.1
10	Atonement	905	+322	5.1

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