The non-existence of a third season of Joe Penhall and David Fincher’s Netflix series Mindhunter has always had a lot of odd question marks hanging over it. The show itself was clearly gearing up for an eventual third season, leaving open series-long hints that it was building toward the hunt for the notorious BTK Killer, while Netflix itself never actually canceled the thing. (It was on “indefinite hold” for years, despite officially releasing its cast from their contractual commitments, until Fincher put a bullet in it himself in 2023.) Initially, things officially slowed down because Fincher was working on his passion project Mank, followed by him making some noises about how the streamer wasn’t happy about the series’ growing budgets. But Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos is now finally happy to portion out the blame a little more evenly, giving statements this week saying that the death of Mindhunter was ultimately Fincher’s call.
Interestingly, Sarandos—who, per Collider, was speaking at an event in New Delhi this week—is the one that actually brought the aborted series up. (It is possible that press fervor for asking questions about Mindhunter may have abated slightly in the seven years since the show last released a new episode.) Asked if there were any films he’d wished Netflix had managed to make a sequel for, but hadn’t, Sarandos instead pivoted to TV: “Mindhunter, David Fincher’s series on Netflix. We always anticipated there would be a third season, and he got very busy making a film. And David is an unbelievably meticulous creator, so he couldn’t do two things at the same time, and he certainly didn’t want to short-change either one. So it just got pushed off and pushed off. I would have loved to have seen a third season of Mindhunter.”
Possibly coincidentally, Sarandos’ comments about Fincher come the same week that news trickled out that one of his other Netflix projects, a somewhat nebulous American adjunct of Korean streaming hit Squid Game, had also evaporated. Although Netflix got a lot of early clout out of bringing Fincher aboard as one of its resident creators—he served as an executive producer on the streamer’s very first big original hit, House Of Cards—the partnership has been less productive in recent years. That being said, he does have a new movie landing on the streaming service later this year, as his Once Upon A Time In Hollywood side project The Adventures Of Cliff Booth debuts this December.
