It’s fair to say that Martin Scorsese’s Netflix film The Irishman is one of the most talked about movies of the past few weeks, particularly with its all-star veteran cast of Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Joe Pesci, among others, making it something of a callback to the classics that made Scorsese such a legendary director.
It probably won’t surprise many to learn then that the mafia pic has the Nielsen numbers to back up its success. According to Variety, The Irishman has been watched by more than 17 million viewers in the U.S. alone. And that’s just in its first week of release. The actual figure stands at around 17.1 million watchers within five days. Impressive, right?
Using an average minute metric (which looks at the average amount of time viewers spend watching something compared to the total runtime), Nielsen calculated that the movie maintained a steady audience of around 13.2 million viewers, which puts it ahead of the Breaking Bad film, El Camino, which had an average minute audience of 8.2 million (with figures saying it achieved 25 million streams in its first seven days).
Sadly, however, that hasn’t been enough to outdo last year’s Netflix sensation Bird Box, which brought in nearly 26 million U.S. viewers with an average minute audience of 16.9 million. Still, the figures for The Irishman are hugely impressive, despite Nielsen saying that they don’t have enough data yet to determine whether or not the saga can be considered a rousing success. After all, there’s been some backlash aimed at Netflix recently after subscribers called the film “boring.”
For those who may not’ve seen it yet, The Irishman is a fictionalized account of the true story of Frank Sheeran (played by De Niro), a hitman who reflects on his life of crime, particularly his involvement with the disappearance of his life-long friend Jimmy Hoffa (played by Pacino) back in 1975. Even despite its incredibly lengthy runtime of over 3 hours, it’s well worth a watch and if you haven’t caught it already, be sure to find some time to do so.
