By Debbie McGoldrick

Jim Sheridan must be awfully disappointed with how his movie with rapper 50 Cent, Get Rich or Die Tryin’, has been received by the U.S. public.

It certainly doesn’t qualify as this year’s Thanksgiving turkey, like Colin Farrell’s abysmal Alexander 12 months ago, but the film has dropped off the box office Top 10 chart after only two weeks in release and seems destined for a quick conversion to DVD. Since its mid-November release, it has grossed less than $30 million in ticket sales, which is well below expectations.

The film had hit written all over it, or so it seemed. 50 is a huge name in the rap world with a massive fan following, and Sheridan is a top-class director whose films have been nominated for several Oscars. Rap colleague Eminem had a huge hit with his semi-autobiographical film 8 Mile, so it stood to reason that Cent would easily convert into dollars — lots of them.

So what happened? The reviews weren’t awful by any means, but the killing of a fan in a movie theater during a screening two days after the film was released, and other reports of violence and security concerns at places where it was showing, didn’t exactly make people rush to the cineplex. In showbiz they say all publicity is good publicity, but real-life violence is definitely a no-no.

We were planning on seeing Get Rich during its first few days of release, but decided to wait for Fitty’s hard-core gangsta fan base to calm down a bit. On Thanksgiving weekend, we discovered, the film was reduced to only three locations in Manhattan.

Oh well. Sheridan is a superb filmmaker and a great guy, and he’ll surely bounce back. The soundtrack to the film is flying nicely on the Billboard charts, and it seems that director and rapper really grew to appreciate each other.

“He never voiced an opinion that didn’t endorse what I wanted to do,” Sheridan recently said.

“He was the rock, once I was past everybody else to get to him. He wanted to make a Jim Sheridan movie — he didn’t really care about making a movie for the producers, the writers, or the studio.”