STAR TREK BEYOND debuts in wide release today for the United States and 36 other international markets, but the Wednesday night Kelvin Timeline marathon and Thursday’s early-bird showings have already started to gain decent ticket sale revenue.

The new film, which is out in 3,928 theaters nationwide today, drew in a surprising $5.5 Million figure just from preview screenings, which is a big increase from the $2 Million preview opening nabbed by Star Trek Into Darkness back in 2013. BEYOND wasn’t expected to top STID’s opening weekend numbers (which finished at just over $70 Million in May 2013), but this could signal a larger sales figure yet to come for the new movie.

Per Deadline, this is actually a bigger take than last year’s Spectre, which grabbed $5.25 Million for preview showings of the latest James Bond film.

Deadline also gets deep into social media tracking:

In terms of social media, Star Trek Beyond has a strong Social Media Universe of 191M. The third installment breaks down as 27.1M Facebook fans, 26.2M Twitter followers, about 3M Instagram followers, and over 134.7M YouTube views. According to RelishMix, the film is benefitting from YouTube views from earlier installments in the series. The official trailer is getting 20K to 30K views daily, but daily view counts for most videos for Beyond are rather light, in the 10K to 25K range. The earned-owned ratio of 7:1 is also good, but not great.

The addition, they say that Rihanna’s music video has been a spark plug, adding 20M views since June, 30th. And, the cast is engaged from Simon Pegg (7.9M fans and followers) to Zachary Quinto to Zoe Saldana, which is good news beyond its big Comic-Con presence.

In fact, as of Thursday afternoon, the #StarTrek, #StarTrekMovie, #StarTrekBeyond, #StarTrekPremiere and other related hashtags really started taking off more than doubling the amount of activity from yesterday morning.

We’ll follow up as the weekend progresses to see just how far BEYOND tracks during these opening days in theaters.