Back in 2023 came confirmation that a third season of David Fincher’s acclaimed series “Mindhunter,” about the early days of the FBI’s profiling of serial killers, was dead.
The show’s second season was released in August 2019, and after that there’d been no word on a follow-up. Fincher served as showrunner throughout the two-season run, and ultimately directed seven of its nineteen episodes.
In late 2020, while promoting “Mank,” 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.
Then came 2023, when he told Le Journal du Dimanche that the decision was ultimately down to Netflix and came down to cost of the series vs. its viewership figures:
“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.”
Netflix then bore the brunt of anger from the show’s fanbase over the decision – but was it really all them? Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos is now suggesting it wasn’t. Appearing at a panel held by The Indian Express (via TV Line) earlier this month, Sarandos indicates it was Fincher’s schedule, not the show’s cost, that the show went on ‘indefinite hiatus’.
Asked by the moderator what was the sequel or part two of a series that should’ve gotten made but was never done, Sarandos was quite clear:
“It’s not a part two, it’s a part three that I wish we would’ve got to. ‘Mindhunter’, David Fincher’s series on Netflix that… we always anticipated there would be a third season, and he got very busy making a film, and David is an unbelievably meticulous creator, so he couldn’t just do two things at the same time, and he certainly didn’t want to shortchange either one. So it got pushed off and pushed off and, I would’ve loved to have seen a third season of ‘Mindhunter'”
Despite what happened, Fincher and Netflix remain very much working colleagues with the Fincher-directed “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” follow-up, “The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth,” getting a theatrical run of two weeks starting November 25th ahead of a Netflix release on December 23rd.
