The Weinstein Company – before the Harvey Weinstein scandal dismantled the once major Hollywood powerhouse — signed on to distribute “Sing Street” in the U.S. after having worked with Carney on “Begin Again.” That movie ended up making $63.4 million worldwide against an $8 million budget. With another musical charmer, the studio had every reason to believe things would go well again. It went fine, if far from great.
Riding a wave of positive buzz from critics, “Sing Street” hit theaters on April 15, 2016, opening on just five screens to try and build some hype. Things started out well enough, as the film made $65,573 for a great $12,714 per-screen average. The problem is that the summer movie season was just around the corner, and it sort of felt like it was already there, with Disney’s eventual $966 million hit live-action version of “The Jungle Book” opening that same weekend. In the weeks that followed, other massive blockbusters such as “Captain America: Civil War,” “The Huntsman: Winter’s War,” “The Angry Birds Movie,” and “X-Men: Apocalypse,” among quite a few others, opened and soaked up the lion’s share of the spotlight.
Carney’s much-acclaimed musical only played on more than 500 screens for two weekends and never climbed higher than number 12 on the charts in North America. The movie finished its run with $3.2 million domestically to go with a better-but-not-great $10.3 million internationally for a grand total of $13.6 million worldwide. For a movie with a tiny $3 million budget, that was more or less fine, as VOD, Blu-ray sales, cable rights, and other revenue streams would help bolster its earnings. But with ticket sales like that, the audience was still relatively limited, and other bigger, flashier movies dominated the discussion for the year.