David Fincher Explains Why Mindhunter Season 3 Never Happened

David Fincher has explained why Mindhunter had to end on Netflix after just two seasons.

During the show’s brief run, Mindhunter was highly acclaimed, garnering praise from critics along with Netflix subscribers. Its first season debuted on the streaming platform in 2017, followed by Season 2’s arrival in 2019. Many were hoping to see the story continue in a third season, but Fincher — a director and EP on the series — said in 2023 that the show was officially dead. Per The Fincher Analyst on X, Fincher shared a more detailed explanation with Première Magazine on why Mindhunter had to end, suggesting that Netflix just wasn’t willing to give him the budget he’d want for the potential third season.

Bill Tench (Holt McCallany) looks up at Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff) in Mindhunter

Mindhunter Season 3 Was Never Happening – But Could’ve Been Its Best

Mindhunter Season 3 is now definitively a pipe dream, but would’ve taken the Jonathan Groff and Holt McCallany-led Netflix series to another level.

David Fincher Couldn’t Compromise the Desired Approach to Season 3

“Maybe House of Cards wasn’t a huge risk, but Mindhunter was,” Fincher said (translated from French, per Screen Rant). “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? 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 continued, “We did not want to change our approach so, 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!'”

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Mindhunter starred Jonathan Groff and Holt McCallany as FBI agents Holden Ford and Bill Tench, respectively. The series explored the founding of the Behavioral Science Unit in the FBI during the late 1970s, a time when criminal profiling was getting established for the bureau. Mindhunter notably featured the two speaking with notorious, real-life murderers.

Seasons 1 and 2 of Mindhunter are streaming on Netflix.

Source: Première Magazine