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In theory it doesn’t. But how many properties remain really popular longer than fifty years? Sherlock Holmes and Dracula maybe, but for every one of those there’s a thousand things that died.
In music we've recently had blockbuster biopics of Queen and Elton John and Black Sabbath's farewell gig last summer was the highest grossing benefit concert of all time (third highest when adjusted for inflation), so I'd say quite a few. The Rolling Stones's tour two years ago also grossed $235 million but that might be considered too "oldies" to really count as popular.
Music tends to age better because it relies on fewer background cultural assumptions. War Pigs will still be stirring in a hundred years for the same reason Ride of the Valkyries is.
If any album can be said to have birthed an entire new music genre, it would have to be Paranoid. Black Sabbath were fairly unique in that they could have played their 50 year old material at any modern metal festival without sounding one bit stylistically dated or "oldies".
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The difference between Star Wars and Dracula is partly that Dracula long ago passed through the public domain middle ground, where Dracula fans have to be able to distinguish what they think of as "Dracula" from what they ignore. There is no canonical Dracula lore. Or consider the Trojan War: Homer is pretty much required, but the vast amount of material in the Matter of Troy isn't considered equal, or even sorted through. Every author and every reader picks and chooses how they want the story to go.
Star Wars has for a long time maintained that everything that appeared on screen is the business of Star Wars fans. Sure the novellas or the comics or whatever might be iffy or unimportant, but if it was on the big screen it was legit. Now we're breaking that boundary, you can be a "real" star wars fan without caring about any of that.
This in turn leaves the fan to build their own universe. Which is rapidly going to become the case for everything as AI makes it increasingly possible to churn out infinite content.
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Just off the top of my head Shakespeare / Wuthering Heights / Jane Austen / Tolkein / Dickens esp. A Christmas Carol / arguably Kipling / Lovecraft.
Yes, there's a fierce winnowing process, in part because public attention is a limited resource. But look at Lovecraft, for example. Lovecraftian horror became a genre, there are lots of parodies and cutesy anime Narth???tep and Lovecraft-lite stuff, and the racial elements are toned way down, but broadly there are works which play it straight released every year and the genre is in rude health precisely because works are still being released which respect its spirit.
(Reminds me that I want to play Still Wakes the Deep).
But there’s a very strong survivorship bias here. Weird Fiction was an entire commercial genre, and very popular. And now out of that whole genre you are left with maybe two authors who still have name recognition, Lovecraft and Burroughs. Jane Austen is still popular but the PCU (Pamela Cinematic Universe) doesn’t seem to have materialized. I’m saying that there was a very good chance that Star Wars was going to eventually fall into obscurity anyway, with or without Kennedy’s idiocy. Although she probably did speed the process up by about ten or fifteen years.
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