“Bond comes back out of retirement and, in the end, regains his License to Kill numbers (maybe she dies).”
Where did you read that?
At their core franchise films are about formula. The Bond producers have been pretty good at keeping the essential elements of the original films which has allowed them to swap in new leads and still be successful.
The essential formula device used in every Bond film that I can think of is the sexual competition between Bond and the male villain over one or more of the villain’s female conquests. Bond seduces the conquest using his superior male charm and this leads to the unraveling of the villain’s plot or at least complicates it by causing him to make dumb mistakes.
I just don’t see how this primordial human male dynamic can be translated to a female lead. Is she going to just seduce the villain away from her competition? Or will she seduce the villain’s female conquest like Bond but with a lesbian twist.
I might accept the action scenes and fight scenes with a female lead with enough CGI and editing but I can’t give up the essential “cool” factor of stealing the villain’s girlfriend as part of his destruction. Maybe this lead change will work but I don’t think they have thought this out very well.