Our amount of content available and cultural changes due to that would make this basically impossible for any celebrity to achieve in the modern world.

Swift would be the closest American and I don’t think you’d get close to this. It’s a product of an older era. Elvis, Beatles, Michael Jackson - the Internet has diversified our preferences so much that this phenomenon is unlikely to happen ever again

People were being force fed this content because, it was all they had - listen to one of a few dozen radio stations or turn on one of a few dozen TV stations.

Now, it’s pick from thousands of artists, music or movies or games, entertainment has exploded in a way you can create your own little “sphere” of entertainment that actually does, in a way, cater to your personal taste. You’re never exposed to content you didn’t specifically request.

I doubt this level of fascination being pervasive is possible to reach now or in the future, unless we have a technological decline, and our choices become stifled again like they were in the second half of the 1900s

Also, economic crash thats sustained for years and years could get us back to this sort of place

But, all things being equal, if the status quo is more or less maintained with access to technology, and economies dont absolutely shatter; this likely isnt in the cards to happen again.