Come on bro, Ben Hurt was 1959
Exodus: gods and Kings was this decade and it wasn't exactly a blockbuster.
And did you see a sequel? No.
Are you going to see a sequel for
Wonder Woman and
Black Panther? Yes and yes.
It's as simple as that.
I don't have to go that far back. It's just that
Ben-Hur was the highest grossing film in history at the point it was released. Culturally appropriated IP didn't stop being profitable. Your question is just so arbitrary. It's like me saying, "
Wonder Woman wasn't the highest grossing film last year. What does that tell you about American movie audiences?"
Frankly, these grosses tell one more about the current politics of film studios, the disappearance of middle-budget movies at the box office due to the rise of Netflix/streaming, and the decline of the era in which starpower reigned (now it's about franchising, not individual actors, as your prime marketing incentive). It speaks to changing tastes between those older generations and the newer Millennial/GenZ generations, too.
Look at last year's Top 10 grossing movies, domestically. Six of them are comic book movies, one is an animation, one is a CGI-heavy retelling of a Disney classic, and the leader is a Star Wars film. Only a single film had a budget under $75m. People don't leave their home theaters except for spectacle, now: special effect bonanzas and the like. Meanwhile, these special effects movies are entirely controlled and manufactured by far-left Hollywood liberals captaining the major film studios, now, who have embraced activism in their casting.
Do I think it matters one bit, commercially, if they swapped in an actor as white as the driven snow to play Heimdall (as written) instead of Idris Elba? Absolutely not. But I don't think the American audiences much care that the character was blackwashed, either. Simultaneously, I see that there is a more robust market and appetite for these mini-franchises to be headlined by women or minorities than ever before.
That's what I'm reading in the tea leaves.