19/01/2009

The 2008 season saw the highest audience figures in Poland for the past 20 years with 34.1m admissions. Moreover, Polish productions are the source of these excellent results, as in 2007.

In 2004, there was an increase from 23.8 million to 33.4 million admissions, which encouraged an industry boosted by the multiplex boom. Despite the rapid development of several movie theatre networks, the results for 2005 were the lowest of the previous five years (23.6m admissions). The 2006 and 2007 seasons were not marked by significant growth.

Popular Polish films were the biggest hits of 2008. Among the 12 best starts of the year were six domestic features. In first position is Tomasz Konecki’s Ladies (160 screens - 302,000 viewers), followed by Piotr Weresniak’s Don’t Lie, Honey (156 screens - 280,000 admissions).

Next in line are Juliusz Machulski’s How Much Does the Trojan Horse Weigh? (117 screens - 155,000 viewers), Paweł Pitera’s Testimony (180 screens - 151,000 admissions), Slawomir Krynski’s It's Not What You Think, Darling (137 screens - 146,000 viewers) and Mariusz Malec’s Once Again (118 screens - 142,000 admissions).

The rest of the list is made up of US productions, including UK co-productions Quantum of Solace [+see also:
trailer
making of
film profile] and Mamma Mia!.

It’s an encouraging sign that this positive trend in audience figures has continued into 2009, which opened with the second best start in the past 20 years. This was achieved by US animated blockbuster Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa (566,532 admissions – the record is still held by Shrek the Third with 793,753 viewers).

Moreover, 850,000 admissions were garnered at the Polish box office in the first weekend of 2009. This is the second best result of the past ten years.

(Translated from French)