I don't think Alien can rise in franchise stature to the size or fanbase of Star Wars or Star Trek. That's also not a bad thing. For all the money it's made, the Star Wars franchise has suffered greatly since TESB, and it has not materially improved since Disney took over. Star Trek... I don't know what that is any more. I think it died and its bloated corpse is now walking around.
I think as a franchise, Dark Horse had the right idea. Not every story was a winner, but the idea was right. The Alien has become a fact of life in the universe, and humanity struggles to deal with its presence. With hypercapitalism as a driving force, corporations try to profit from it (often with horrible results). The military tries to dominate it and utilize it as a weapon of war. Failing that, the military must defend against it. Ordinary people try to survive it.
In that respect, AVP also works in the DH mythos as the Predators have a symbiotic relationship with both the Alien and with humans. There is room for stories about the androids in human culture, and it makes sense to say something about the Engineers. There are questions that could be answered. How is it that humans have spaceships with casually perfect artificial gravity and FTL drive but weapons are not really much more advanced than what we've got today? I'd go with "we stole it from these more advanced other races." How about that hypersleep? You know freezing a body actually blows out the cell walls as the water inside freezes. Future humans solved that without a blood-to-chemical transfusion. That's sort of interesting. And the creature. Even with all Scott has done, the creature is still sort of an enigma. Why that physical form? And so on. Of course, it's easier to make all that work in comics. Lower budgets, lower financial expectations. But it shows clearly that Alien can exist as a larger franchise.
I will add my bias: I like the original movie the best. I like AVP, too, for what it tried to do and for the places where it really did succeed. I like the rest in varying degrees of not as much for a list of reasons far too long to post here. YMMV and that's fine.
