When did he ascend to his current status then? Or rather when did that begin? With the push for the MLK holiday in the early 1980s?
I know that when the activists first started the idea of an MLK holiday, that I would ask people to name the top 10 figures of the 1960s, I did that in various states and for years, and they never thought to mention MLK.
When this movie news dies out again and MLK slips off the media radar again, you can experiment at parties and in conversations, gently coax people who lived during the 1960s into describing the big figures of the 1960s and they will start describing their memories of Nixon, LBJ, Jerry Rubin types, the Black Panthers, Malcom X, George Wallace, and of course movie and music people, John Wayne, the Beatles, Hendrix, Lee Marvin, and they will want to get deeper into their interests, maybe Alfred Hitchcock, or the anti-war movement, or JFK and Lee Harvey Oswald, it will become a history discussion, but you will be amazed at how vague and foggy and forgetful people are about MLK, unless you bring him up.
Listen to them wax on about the things they truly remember and which were iconic, and then bring up MLK, and notice how people are suddenly at a loss for words, and start stumbling around with some faint and uncomfortable, “great man”, “really did some good for blacks” vague platitudes about what was merely a political figure of his time, in a time filled with bigger than life political figures.
As a young man I used to try to defend MLK, but eventually I came to see him as most adults at the time did, but today he is a giant so big, that he has his own national holiday and kids are brainwashed to revere him, it is something straight out of 1984.