The Irishman's Netflix debut wasn't as strong as Bird Box's, according to Nielsen

Martin Scorsese's critically-acclaimed Oscar contender The Irishman debuted to strong numbers on Netflix, according to Nielsen. But evidently, it couldn't quite take down Bird Box.

Nielsen said Friday that in its first five days of release, The Irishman drew an average U.S. audience of 13.2 million viewers, per The Hollywood Reporter. The Reporter notes that this number, though impressive, is smaller than the average number of viewers who watched Bird Box, the post-apocalyptic Sandra Bullock movie that became an unexpected phenomenon last December, over its first five days: 16.9 million.

These numbers represent the film's average-minute audience, which indicates the "average number of viewers calculated based on a movie's total runtime," Variety reports. The Irishman beat El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie's average-minute audience of 8.2 million, though. The figures don't account for viewership outside of the United States and only count viewers watching on televisions. Netflix has taken issue with Nielsen's numbers before, Variety notes, but hasn't released its own viewership figures for The Irishman.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Nielsen's data reveals another interesting detail: that 18 percent of viewers fully watched The Irishman on its release day, Nov. 27. That might not sound great, but the same is evidently true of Bird Box, even though the latter film is about 90 minutes shorter. It's unclear how many viewers who didn't finish The Irishman on its debut day later did so, although Recode's Peter Kafka notes it's safe to assume many chose to split the massive 209-minute film up into several viewings over multiple days.

Either way, The Irishman is certainly off to a solid start based on the Nielsen numbers, and those late to the party may very well get on board as the film continues to pick up awards momentum. It's currently a frontrunner to win best picture; one of the other best picture frontrunners is Marriage Story, another Netflix movie that just hit the service on Friday.