• by Karlene Lukovitz  @KLmarketdaily, December 6, 2019

Netflix’s pricey ($159 million) gamble on the star-studded, three-and-a-half-hour movie “The Irishman” appears to be paying off, at least in terms of initial streaming viewership.

In its first five days on the streaming service, the movie generated an average minute audience of nearly 13.2 million U.S. viewers, and a reach of more than 17.1 million unique U.S. viewers, according to Nielsen’s Subscription Video On Demand Content Ratings.

By comparison, among other recent releases tracked by Nielsen, only “Bird Box” has had a higher first-five-days average minute audience, at 16.9 million.

“The Irishman” — which brings together Al Pacino, Robert DeNiro, Joe Pesci, Harvey Keitel, Ray Romano, Bobby Cannavale and Anna Paquin, among others — was released on Netflix on Thanksgiving eve (November 27), after playing in a some traditional movie cinemas for four weeks starting on November 1.

Other Nielsen stats thus far for the film:

* It had an average minute audience of nearly 2.6 million U.S. viewers on its first day on Netflix, and 3.1 million on its third day (November 29). 

* 751,000 P2+ U.S. viewers (18% of the audience) watched the full movie on Day 1. That’s equal to the watched-in-entirety premiere-day performance of “Bird Box” (18%) and better than “El Camino” (11%), both considerably shorter movies. “The Irishman”s watched-in-entirety viewers peaked on November 29, at 930,000. 

* Its Day 1 viewing audience was 20% men aged 50 to 64, and that demographic still represented 15% of the audience by Day 5.

* By Day 5, the median viewer age was 49. That’s similar to the average for Season 2 of “The Crown” (50), and older than Netflix’s average viewer (31).