It looks like 2024 has got under way with something that Polish distributors and cinema owners had been lacking for the past three years: new hope. After a mere month, a local title has topped the box office for the fourth week in a row, and has just exceeded a record 2 million admissions. Kleks Academy, which was released on 25 December 2023, with some well-attended advance screenings, has emerged as the most popular Polish title since 2019.

Regardless of the poor reviews from critics, this young adult-orientated film, based on the cult classic book Mr Inkblot’s Academy by Jan Brzechwa (which already has a successful screen adaptation dating from 1983), has been shown on a total of 522 cinema screens. The story follows the pre-teen Ada Niezgódka (Antonina Litwiniak), who joins the titular academy, full of magic and wonders, and led by the eccentric Professor Kleks (Cold War [+leggi anche:
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Q&A: Pawel Pawlikowski
scheda film]’s Tomasz Kot). She visits the fantastical and sometimes scary worlds of fairy tales and stories, and discovers a family secret – pretty much your standard plot.

Director Maciej Kawulski previously worked in a very different genre, on the gangster movies How I Became a Gangster. A True Story [+leggi anche:
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scheda film] and How I Fell in Love with a Gangster, which became popular among local audiences, too. Kawulski also served as a producer on the erotic 365 Days [+leggi anche:
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scheda film] trilogy; the first film was nominated for the Razzie Awards and became the butt of many jokes among the TikTok crowd. He also holds a producer credit for Kleks Academy, which was written by Krzysztof Gureczny and Agnieszka Kruk.

Kawulski’s record-breaking film wasn’t the only local title that landed a spot in the weekly box office – the first runner-up is Kogel Mogel 5, which racked up 153,000 admissions on its opening weekend. It’s worth mentioning that the third part of this romantic comedy, Kogel Mogel 3 [+leggi anche:
trailer
scheda film], which premiered in 2019, was the previous film to have sold over 2 million tickets. The second runner-up is the critics’ darling Scarborn, the winner of the Polish Film Festival’s top prize in 2023 (see the news), which debuted by taking 55,000 admissions in cinemas. Additionally, Fuks 2, the follow-up to a 1990s action-comedy, landed in seventh place with 30,000 admissions (and 264,000 in total since its release on 12 January).

As Kleks Academy continues to draw in audiences, its sequel is already being readied for a January 2025 release.