First, some context. You're familiar with Ricky Gervais's point about religion. If you're not, it's only 90 seconds.
OK, so here's the Gedankenversuch. Suppose that overnight we all lose our memory of which books and movies are acclaimed and/or popular. Everyone in the world, I mean. Those books and movies and TV shows are all still around, we can look at any of them, but we no longer know which were famous and which had been forgotten by history.
Fast forward ten years. Are the famous books and movies of this imaginary 2032 the same as now? Completely different? Or is there some overlap? And if the last, which are the IPs that can make a comeback despite mass amnesia?
Of course, in reality you'd be able to see which stories had had endless sequels and remakes. Frankenstein, for example. But let's not nitpick about how this would work. Let's just postulate that somehow we can access all the stories of the past but we don't know which of them we used to think were best.
Sometimes the first to market gets to be the most popular. That's true of D&D, for example. But just as often it's not the case. If all of entertainment were to reset to Year Zero, would The Books of Magic become more popular than Harry Potter? Would Tanith Lee's Tales from the Flat Earth outsell The Sandman? Would Dorothy L Sayers take the crown of Queen of Crime from Agatha Christie? Or would Father Brown be better known than Hercule Poirot? In the field of fantasy, would we still be glued to Lord of the Rings spin-offs or would Jeff Bezos be spending half a billion on Gormenghast or Lord of Light instead? Would SF blockbusters be built around Larry Niven's Known Space instead of Dune and Star Wars? And would our favourite albino swordsman be Elric of Melniboné rather than Geralt of Rivia or all those decadent, pale, white-haired, draconically empowered kings on House of the Dragon?
To sum up: in the evolution of entertainment franchises, how much is in the "fitness" of the concept and how much is down to luck?
