Why did Phantom Menace have such great legs?

By all accounts the movie was poorly received by many people when it came out, but I wouldn’t know (I was still in my dads balls until a year later) I mean everybody shat on Jar Jar. My dad said there was cheering at the opening crawl and everyone left the movie in silence. They dedicated a whole South Park episode to it, and even there was even a jar jar reference in the South Park movie only a month later.

However its run (excluding re-releases) ended at a ~6.73x multiplier. That’s pretty wild. It adjusts to nearly a billion in today’s dollars. Was it just so much of a cultural event that it defied audience reception? I’m aware a lot of people love the prequels, hell I watched The Phantom Menace on repeat as a kid and loved all the prequels (including the original trilogy of course) and loved all the Clone Wars show and prequel additions to the LEGO Star Wars games, so maybe it had to do with children loving it?