Martin Scorsese wanted everybody to see it in theaters, but millions of people have streamed his three-and-a-half-hour mafia epic on Netflix.

The streaming platform bet big on “The Irishman,” and it appears to have paid off, with the film garnering an average audience of 13.2 million in the United States over the long Thanksgiving weekend, according to data provided by Nielsen.

The $159 million film, released on Netflix on Nov. 27, the day before Thanksgiving, stars Robert De Niro and Al Pacino and examines organized crime in midcentury America. It attracted 3.9 million unique viewers in the United States on the first day of its release, with 20 percent of them men ages 50 to 64. The audience age decreased over the five-day period, according to Nielsen, settling on an average of 49, similar to the audience makeup for Season 2 of “The Crown.” The average Netflix viewer is 31.

With the length of the film being a potential issue for home viewers, Nielsen reported that 18 percent of audiences watched the movie in its entirety on the first day of streaming, on a par with the premiere of the Sandra Bullock thriller “Bird Box” last December. “Bird Box,” one of Netflix’s biggest hits, had 16.9 million viewers over the first five days of its release, while the “Breaking Bad” movie “El Camino” had 8.2 million in that same span in October, according to Nielsen.