Sing Street Was Only A Minor Hit – But Lived On Well Beyond The Box Office

(Welcome to Tales from the Box Office, our column that examines box office miracles, disasters, and everything in between, as well as what we can learn from them.)

One of the sad truths of the movie business as it exists is that great movies will sometimes slip through the cracks. A movie as good as "Booksmart" deserved a lot better than $25 million at the box office. Both "Blade Runner" and "The Thing" deserved better than getting trounced by "E.T." in 1982. Fortunately, cream tends to rise to the top over time, and good movies often find their audience eventually. Perhaps no movie released theatrically over the last decade deserved to find its audience more than director John Carney's "Sing Street."

Released in 2016, the movie about a kid who starts a band to impress a girl charmed just about every single person who saw it. The only problem is that not all that many people saw the movie while it was in theaters. Luckily, Carney's film was cheap to produce, so it wasn't exactly a flop. At the same time, though, it feels like a film that should have had that "La La Land" pop and become a cultural phenomenon. It was simply too good to be lost to time.

The film had to settle for something akin to cult status, fighting against the endless tide of content in the streaming era to avoid being forgotten. Seven years later, Carney is finally back with his first new movie since, "Flora and Son," which premiered in select theaters this weekend. It's just a damn shame it took so long.

In this week's Tales from the Box Office, in honor of Carney's return to the director's chair, we're looking back at "Sing Steet," how it came to be, what happened when it hit theaters, the reputation the film has garnered since its lackluster theatrical run, and what lessons we can learn from it several years removed. Let's dig in.

John Carney made his way onto Hollywood's radar in 2007 with the micro-budget "Once," which found critical acclaim and financial success following a wildly successful debut at Sundance. The filmmaker followed that up with "Begin Again" in 2013, a bigger-budget Hollywood film with bigger stars, namely Keira Knightley and Mark Ruffalo. "Sing Street" sort of represented a conclusion to this unique musical trilogy Carney had crafted.

Carney grew up in Ireland and his first love was music. In that way, "Sing Street," which takes place in Ireland in the '80s, mirrored elements of his life. It was billed as autobiographical in the lead-up to its release, though only select bits of the film mirror Carney's actual upbringing. Rather, it was about capturing a feeling. Speaking to Den of Geek in 2016, Carney compared the film to both "Once" and "Begin Again":

"Of these three films [Sing Street] is the most honest. Not honest in that it's any more autobiographical than the other films. Rather [that] was how I was feeling at the time I made it. That's how I felt when I was a kid in school. It was a genuine attempt to remember what it was like to be that age, and not put an adult spin on it. Not try and put a narrator narrating it, and be a traditional coming-of-age story. I wanted it to feel that the kids in the film were making the film."

"Sing Street" takes place In 1985 and focuses on a Dublin teenager named Conor (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo) who is contending with issues at home and ends up having to go to a Christian school to help his family save money. After a chance encounter with an aspiring model named Raphina (Lucy Boynton), Conor forms a rock 'n' roll band with other outcasts from the school to try and win her over.

When the film was first coming together, it was reported that Bono and Edge from U2, one of the biggest bands in the world, were going to help compose the music for it. It's an easy connection to make, given that U2 trace their roots back to Ireland before they became the multi-platinum artists they are today. That may have helped bring some attention to the project in the early days, but in the end, they didn't actually end up contributing any music for the film.

Still, Carney got along just fine, working with Gary Clark to compose the film's original music. That list of songs includes "Drive It Like You Stole It," which was eventually nominated for Best Song at the Critics Choice Awards. They did get some help from a famous face later on though as Maroon 5 lead singer Adam Levine contributed to the film's closing song, "Go Now." Carney had worked with Levine on "Begin Again," so the connective tissue was already there.

Not having a big band like U2 involved sort of ended up suiting the vibe of the film. Carney ended up casting unknown actors and non-actors to play the kids that make up the band. Speaking with Deadline in 2016, Carney explained how that process went:

"[Ferdia Walsh-Peelo] was one the of the first kids that came into the room, and I sort of thought I could do better, but then I realized that he ticked all of the boxes of what I needed for that role, and I should cast him. He wasn't really an actor, he was more of a musician, really. I thought I might be able to find an actor that could pull it off, but as it turns out, the whole band, in fact, in the film are non-actors and never really acted before."

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.

"When the film didn't immediately sort of hit in a box-office sense, I thought it's not going to be an entire flop," Carney told Vanity Fair in December 2016 after the film earned a surprise Best Picture (Musical or Comedy) nomination at the Golden Globes. "I got the sense [that] people are not going to see the film, but people who are going to see it aren't bulls***ting me — they genuinely enjoy it."

This is anecdotal, but "Sing Street" truly does feel like one of those movies that people absolutely love. They don't merely like it. I can speak for myself and say it's easily one of my favorite movies of the last ten years. As someone who writes about movies a lot, people ask me for recommendations frequently. This has become one of my go-to suggestions and not once has anyone said anything short of "I loved it" after they watch it on my recommendation.

That genuine love has helped the film's reputation grow well beyond the box office. Even Bono from U2, who ended up not being involved in the project, had some pretty damn nice things to say about it after seeing the movie. Writing on the band's official website back in 2016, Bono gave it a ringing endorsement:

"My brother gave me the gift of music through my first guitar. We formed a band. In truth, at the same stage, U2 were not as good as the kids in 'Sing Street.' In truth most films you'll see this year won't touch 'Sing Street' ..."

The film's good reputation even helped inspire an Off-Broadway musical that was, unfortunately, hampered by the pandemic in 2020. Unfortunate though that may have been, the fact remains that people have continued to discover this film in the past seven years and, moreover, loudly proclaim their love for it.

One of the biggest crimes is that Carney took a full seven years away from moviemaking after "Sing Street" failed to take off in a meaningful way commercially. He largely focused on the TV show "Modern Love," which helped to pay the bills. "The reason I stopped making movies for a while was that I needed to buy a house, so I went and made television, which got me enough money to buy a house, and then I returned to filmmaking to get some furniture in the house [laughs], which should give you a sense of how big TV is," Carney told Collider recently.

A filmmaker this talented shouldn't have to wait seven years to make a movie, in my humble opinion. In a right and just world, Carney would have had more offers than he could handle if his impossibly charming 2016 musical had garnered the attention it deserved. That box office run in a crowded summer certainly didn't help anything. I try not to point my finger at fellow film lovers, but this always felt like a situation where the moviegoing public failed a genuine gem.

Perhaps Carney himself put it best in that same 2016 Den of Geek interview. "The reviews are really good, and the exit polls are way better than 'Once' and 'Begin Again.' But to get people to go into a cinema to see an Irish film that's a musical, with a relatively unknown director and cast? It's hard to get people to commit to it," he said. "We have to look at films in terms of their longevity."

Yes, the money men in Hollywood are going to point to the box office and, in that way, "Sing Street" merely doing okay is always going to feel disappointing. But we should look at this things in terms of longevity, and this feels like a movie that is going to continue to win people over in the long run. Time will be kind to Carney's little coming-of-age masterpiece.