The Netflix serial killer series Mindhunter sputtered out in a really odd way. It’s not rare for us to hear that Netflix has cancelled a series – but they never said they had cancelled Mindhunter. After the second season of the show was released in 2019, it was said that season 3 had been put on hold so executive producer and “de facto showrunner” David Fincher could focus on directing the film Mank and producing the second season of the animated anthology Love, Death & Robots. (Both for Netflix.) Then it was said that Mindhunter was on “indefinite hiatus” and the cast were released from their contracts. By the end of 2020, Fincher was saying that season 3 was unlikely – but in early 2021, there were rumors that he and Netflix were talking about reviving the show after all. That didn’t pan out, and during a new interview with the French magazine Le Journal du Dimanche, Fincher confirmed that season 3 is never going to happen. He even gave a quote saying why Mindhunter ended.
Fincher said (with thanks to Collider for the quote), “I’m very proud of the first two seasons. But it’s a very expensive show and, in the eyes of Netflix, we didn’t attract enough of an audience to justify such an investment. I don’t blame them, they took risks to get the show off the ground, gave me the means to do Mank the way I wanted to do it and they allowed me to venture down new paths with The Killer. It’s a blessing to be able to work with people who are capable of boldness. The day our desires are not the same, we have to be honest about parting ways.“
Mindhunter had the following synopsis: Catching a criminal often requires the authorities to get inside the villain’s mind to figure out how he thinks. That’s the job of FBI agents Holden Ford and Bill Tench. They attempt to understand and catch serial killers by studying their damaged psyches. Along the way, the agents pioneer the development of modern serial-killer profiling.
Fincher had previously indicated that if Mindhunter season 3 were to get rolling, Netflix wanted him to lower the budget – which would have been impossible, because season 3 would have been about the FBI agents “getting out of the basement” and going out to Hollywood. So it sounds like it would have required a budget at least as big as season 2’s, if not bigger.
Are you disappointed that Mindhunter had to be set aside due to budgetary issues? Share your thoughts on the end of the series by leaving a comment below.