I think its a few things. I don't think politics is one of them. Because you can have a woman or a person of color as the next martial arts hero, whether or not the movie is "woke" is irrelevant to whether or not it's a martial arts movie.
First, you don't need to be a martial artist to do martial arts in movies anymore. Look at The Matrix movies. Keanu Reeves, Lawrence Fishbourne, Carrie-Anne Moss, and Hugo Weaving are not martial artists. (Keanu Reeves is now, but he really wasn't then). They trained for an extensive amount of time to be able to do those moves.
That's actually a good example, because they did train extensively for the movie. Most movies just have the actors learn a few moves, and then use a combination of shaky cam and quick cuts to make it look good. Lots of movies these days have continuity errors in the fight scenes because of how chopped up, re-shot, and heavily edited they are.
It used to be that in order to put martial arts in a movie, you took martial artists and put them in the movie. But there are more and more tricks to make people look like martial artists when they really don't know what they're doing. Especially in a big-budget movie.
That's the second thing. Budget. There are no mid-budget movies anymore. Movie studios only really produce two types of movies: mega blockbusters, and cheap indy films. They only market the blockbusters. A martial arts movie is going to have to be an indy film, and then it's not going to get the same distribution as a blockbuster.
Captain America does a lot of martial arts in his movies. Chris Evans isn't really thought of as a martial artist. He's an actor. He's in great shape. He's done action movies. But he's thought of as an actor first and foremost. I don't know how much of a martial artist he is. He trained in several to prepare for his role. But did he train beyond what he needed in order to be convincing in the role? I don't know the answer to that.
Compare that to Scott Adkins. Scott Adkins is a martial artist. He's done tons of martial arts since he was a kid. Most people probably don't even know who he is, or have ever seen him in a movie. Unless you're specifically looking for martial arts movies on Netflix, you're not going to see him. Most of his marketing is from his social media, which you would only see if you knew who he was.
In order for martial arts movies to be more mainstream, I think we would need mid-budget movies in general to come back.
