The cancellation of Mindhunter would ultimately be the fault of… David Fincher

It was thought that Netflix had shelved Mindhunter for cost reasons. His boss Ted Sarandos has just given another version of the story.

What if David Fincher was ultimately responsible for the disappearance of Mindhunter?

While fans have been hoping for years to see the return of the series dedicated to the beginnings of criminal profiling, Netflix boss Ted Sarandos says that its future would have been compromised above all by the director’s schedule. During a panel organized last week by The Indian Express, Sarandos explained that Netflix had indeed planned a third season. Except that…

“We always planned that there would be a third season, but David became very busy making a movie….”

And when David Fincher embarks on a project, his mind is not elsewhere:

“David is an incredibly meticulous creator. He couldn’t do two things at once and he certainly didn’t want to botch one or the other. So the project got pushed back, again and again… But I would have loved to see a third season of Mindhunter.”

An explanation which, however, contradicts that given by Fincher himself in 2023. The director then explained to the Journal du Dimanche that the series had become too expensive in relation to its audience: “I am very proud of the first two seasons. But it is a very expensive series and, in the eyes of Netflix, we have not attracted enough spectators to justify such an investment for a season 3”, he said at the time.

Before the project was definitively abandoned, the sequel had to take a particularly interesting direction. Andrew Dominik, director of several episodes of season 2, revealed to Collider that Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff), Bill Tench (Holt McCallany) and Wendy Carr (Anna Torv) would have left the basements of the FBI to join Hollywood.

The idea was then to explore the way in which criminal profiling would gradually enter the zeitgeist and become a real cultural phenomenon.

Despite the abandonment of Mindhunter, the relationship between Netflix and Fincher remains strong. The director is currently preparing The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth, a sequel to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood written by Quentin Tarantino. The film will first hit theaters for two weeks starting November 25, before arriving on Netflix on December 23.