David Fincher confirms that Mindhunter was too expensive for Netflix to want more
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Jonathan Groff in Mindhunter
No more Mindhunter, for real this time. It’s been increasingly clear that the David Fincher series wouldn’t return after the second season premiered on Netflix in 2019, but there’s always been a kernel of hope amongst fans that the auteur would return to his serial killer stomping grounds. Even when the cast was released from their contracts in 2020, a rep for the streamer claimed Fincher “may revisit Mindhunter again in the future.” Yet in a new interview, Fincher points the finger toward Netflix’s infamous economic model as the reason there won’t be a third season.
“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 [for Season 3],” he tells the French outlet Le Journal du Dimanche (via Forbes). “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.”
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Previously, Fincher shared that burnout was another big reason for stepping back on Mindhunter. “We had done the first season of Mindhunter without a showrunner, with me pinch-hitting on a week-by-week basis,” he told Vulture in 2020. “We started getting scripts for the second season, and I ended up looking at what was written and deciding I didn’t like any of it. So we tossed it and started over.”
He continued, “I brought in Courtenay Miles, an AD I’d worked with who wanted to write, and she ended up co-showrunning Mindhunter. But it’s a 90-hour work week. It absorbs everything in your life. When I got done, I was pretty exhausted, and I said, ‘I don’t know if I have it in me right now to break season three.’”
But even then, he was upfront about the money issue, acknowledging that “for the viewership that it had, it was an expensive show.” Perhaps Netflix would have given the green light if he could have brought down the costs of creating it, “but I honestly don’t think we’re going to be able to do it for less than I did season two,” he said. “And on some level, you have to be realistic about dollars have to equal eyeballs.” R.I.P. all over again, Mindhunter.
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