Really? I’m as white and male as they come and I was irritated that they chickened-out on moving the series onto a black woman in the last movie.
Would have been something new.
The “you’re a misogynistic dinosaur/I know you are but what am I?” was getting stale.
Would have been interesting to follow a superficially different secret agent. Is she promiscuous at all? If so, does she have sex casually? As a means of getting information? How does a history of colonization affect her work for the former colonizer? What’s the world like through the eyes of a female playboy (playgirl)?
All the Bond tropes are up for explicit reappraisal. Or don’t get meta at all and see how it feels to have a black woman do the things Bond does.
The problem is that most people just aren’t looking for a woke Jane Bond movie. Colonialism isn’t really the first thing on the minds of the average James Bond fan. There are probably other movies you could get a similar energy from (I know I haven’t seen many movies in this subgenre but I saw Ballerina and found it to be quite good, for example., but there’s always Atomic Blonde, The 355, Lucy, and Red Sparrow, if you’re looking for female action films.), so it’s a bit odd to want the James Bond films to be so different.
You also have to consider that we’re now firmly planted in a post-woke era. Idris Elba clearly doesn’t want the role, but maybe 5 if not 10 years ago, it’d actually be more surprising than not for MGM to not go with a black actor like Damson Idris than today. But Disney has proven that viewers are kind of tired of race swaps, and virtue signaling is starting to turn viewers away from films now, rather than serving as provocative marketing.