“ Alien: Romulus ,” the latest entry in a sci-fi and horror saga that ingrained in audiences the notion that “in space, no one can hear you scream,” is generating some buzz at the box office . The film garnered a respectable $6.5 million in Thursday previews and is anticipated to earn $28 million to $38 million in its inaugural weekend of release. However, certain rivals and independent tracking services believe that Disney and 20th Century, the studios behind the film, are being conservative in their estimates. They project “Alien: Romulus” to debut between $40 million or $50 million.

The Thursday numbers certainly suggest that the final results will be on the higher end of projections. They compare favorably with other recent horror-tinged releases such as “A Quiet Place: Day One,” which earned $6.7 million in previews before ending its opening weekend with $52 million in the bank, or “Nope,” which netted $6.4 million before premiering to $44 million in its first weekend.

If “Alien: Romulus” attracts large audiences, it will prolong Disney’s recent streak of success. After a challenging 2023, a year that saw Disney and its affiliated brands release commercially disappointing films like “The Marvels” ($206.1 million) and “Wish” ($255 million), the studio has staged a remarkable rebound. This summer alone witnessed the releases of “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” ($397 million), “Inside Out 2” ($1.59 billion) and “Deadpool & Wolverine” ($1.03 billion). This has propelled Disney to the top in terms of market share, generating over $3 billion in global ticket sales. Looking ahead, Disney is poised to further bolster these figures with “Moana 2” (Nov. 27) and “Mufasa: The Lion King” (Dec. 20) yet to be released.

“Alien: Romulus” is the seventh installment in the “Alien” franchise, set in a distant future where intergalactic travelers repeatedly encounter a life form that's exceptionally difficult to kill and exceptionally skilled at killing them. Fede Alvarez (“Don’t Breathe”) directed the film, joining a distinguished lineage of filmmakers who have orchestrated facehugger-fueled carnage over the decades, including Ridley Scott, the original mastermind behind 1979’s inaugural film, “Alien”; James Cameron, who imparted a feminist perspective to the series with 1986’s “Aliens”; and David Fincher, who has been attempting to forget the experience of “Alien 3,” despite giving Sigourney Weaver a memorable buzz cut. Set between the events of Scott’s initial film and Cameron’s “Aliens,” Alvarez follows a group of colonists (Cailee Spaeny, Archie Renaux and Isabela Merced among them) who are about to endure a high mortality rate on a dilapidated space station serving as an unwelcome home to a xenomorph squatter.

Critics lauded Alvarez’s approach to the cosmic bloodshed, bestowing upon the film a robust 82% “fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Among those in the thumbs-up camp was Variety’s Owen Gleiberman, who characterized “Alien: Romulus” as a “confidently eerie, ingeniously shot, at times nerve-wracking piece of entertainment.”