‘Mindhunter’s David Fincher Reveals Why Netflix Series Was Canceled

David Fincher is setting the record straight on Mindhunter‘s upsetting cancellation at Netflix. Released in 2017 with Season 2 following in August 2019, the Jonathan Groff, Holt McCallany, and Anna Torv-starring psychological crime thriller was not only a massive hit among audiences, but also critically acclaimed. The series holds a 95% audience score and 97% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes, but despite that success, Fincher described the show as a “huge risk” and one that came with a hefty price tag.

“Maybe House of Cards wasn’t a huge risk, but Mindhunter was. A procedural on behavioral sciences that would be neither X-Files, nor CSI, nor Criminal Minds, but would function as the portrait of a guy who loses his virginity in the world of psychosexual sadists?” Fincher shared with Premiere magazine, per FincherAnalyst and translated from French. “We couldn’t complete the trajectory, but it was a gamble. An expensive series, too. Very expensive. We went as far as we could until someone finally said to us, ‘It makes no sense to produce this series like this, unless you can reduce the budget, or make it more pop, so that more people will watch it.’”

Fincher went on to explain that since they “did not want to change our approach… respectfully, they told us that they were drawing a line under it. That’s it: I always take a slight step aside from what is expected of me. Otherwise, I’m not interested. At a test screening of Seven, in the second of silence just before the lights came back on, while everyone was gasping for air, I caught the producer cursing at me, ‘This guy has taken a great thriller and made it into a foreign film!’”

Based on John E. Douglas and Mark Olshaker’s true crime book Mindhunter: Inside the FBI’s Serial Crime Unit, Mindhunter focuses on the early days of the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit and two agents’ quest to reconstruct the criminal profiling process, with Groff starring as FBI Special Agent Holden Ford opposite McCallany’s FBI Special Agent Bill Tench. Torv starred as Wendy Carr, a psychology professor working towards tenure at Boston University who joins the BSU.

Although Mindhunter was met with plenty of success, just days after Season 2 premiered, Netflix confirmed that Mindhunter was put on an “indefinite hold” and there were no plans for a third season. Years later, Fincher confirmed in February 2023 that the series had been canceled and would not be returning for a third season. The first two seasons of Mindhunter are available to stream on Netflix.