‘Mindhunter’ Officially Canceled at Netflix, David Fincher Says

Although David Fincher has continued to work with Netflix on his latest movies, the Gone Girl filmmaker confirmed in a new interview that Mindhunter is over for good. Fincher was an executive producer and director on the critically acclaimed crime series, which saw its first two seasons released in 2017 and 2019. The audience for the two seasons just wasn’t enough to justify the costs for a third season.

“I’m very proud of the first two seasons,” Fincher told the French outlet Le Journal du Dimanche in an interview published on Feb. 19. “But it’s a particularly expensive show and, in the eyes of Netflix, we haven’t attracted a large enough audience to justify such an investment.” 

Fincher said that he does not blame the streamer for their decision, noting that Mindhunter was risky from the beginning. The streamer also took chances on his Oscar-winning2020 film Mank and his next movie, The Killer. “It’s a chance to be able to work with people capable of audacity,” Fincher said of his other Netflix projects. “The day when our desires will no longer be the same, we will have to be honest to separate.”

Mindhunter was created by Joe Penhall and based on the book Mindhunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit by John Douglas and Mark Olshaker. In the first season, Jonathan Groff and Holt McCallany played FBI agents researching how the minds of serial killers work through interviews with killers. The second season saw them focus on the Atlanta murders of 1979 to 1981. Anna Tork played a psychology professor who works with the agents. Fincher directed four of the first season’s 10 episodes and a third of Season 2’s nine episodes.

After Season 2 was released, Netflix canceled the show. Since the streamer never made a formal announcement, fans had long hoped for a return. Over the years, those involved shared details of plans for Season 3, including Andrew Dominik (Blonde), who directed the Charles Manson-centric episode in Season 2.

In April 2022, Dominik told Collider that Season 3 would have seen Groff and McCallany’s agents go to Hollywood. “So one of them was going to be hooking up with Jonathan Demme and the other one was going to be hooking up with Michael Mann,” Dominik explained. “And it was all going to be about profiling making it into the sort of zeitgeist, the public consciousness. It would’ve been… That was the season everyone was really waiting for to do, with when they sort of get out of the basement and start.”

Fincher‘s next Netflix project is The Killer, based on the French graphic novel series by Alexis Nolent and written by Andrew Kevin Walker. Michael Fassbender, Charles Parnell, Arliss Howard, Sophie Charlotte, and Tilda Swinton star in the crime thriller. The film will be released in November.