For some time now it has been widely believed the third season of David Fincher’s acclaimed series “Mindhunter”, about the early days of the FBI’s profiling of serial killers, is not going to happen.
The series followed a group at the FBI that developed the agency’s profiling methods as they interviewed mass murderers. Fincher served as showrunner throughout the two-season run, and ultimately directed seven of its nineteen episodes.
In the time since the second season’s release in August 2019, the series was put on “indefinite hold” and still has never been officially cancelled by the streamer.
When out promoting “Mank” back in late 2020, Fincher said both a combination of exhaustion after making the second season, and the show not getting enough viewers to justify the expense meant he wasn’t sure if the series would be back.
Now over two years on, Fincher seems to have confirmed that Netflix has no plans to proceed with more. Talking to French publication Le Journal du Dimanche (via Games Radar), Fincher was asked about the show’s future and gave an answer that suggests a definitive decision has been made:
“I’m very proud of the first two seasons, but it’s a particularly expensive series and, in the eyes of Netflix, we haven’t attracted a large enough audience to justify such an investment… I don’t blame them, they took risks to launch the series.”
Previously filmmaker Andrew Dominik (“Blonde,” “The Assassination of Jesse James”) revealed that had a third season gone forward, it would’ve seen Jonathan Groff’s Ford and Holt McCallany’s Tench head to Hollywood where the Behavioral Science Unit would share their work with the two filmmakers behind the earliest movies involving the character of Hannibal Lecter – Michael Mann’s “Manhunter” and Jonathan Demme’s “The Silence of the Lambs”.
Fincher’s interview was in France where he went to accept an Honorary Award at this year’s Cesar Awards. He’s still working with Netflix too with his new film, the Michael Fassbender-led “The Killer,” due out this Fall.
