Crime drama Mindhunter was “very expensive” and Netlflix wanted to make it more broad, says director David Fincher – which is partly why series 3 never happened.
David Fincher may have renewed his contract with Netflix for another three years, but unfortunately, it doesn’t sound as though a third season of Mindhunter will be on his list of upcoming projects for the firm.
As translated by The Fincher Analyst on Twitter/X, France’s Premiere magazine – the same outlet that revealed Fincher’s contract had been renewed – asked the director about the subject of experimentation and risk. Fincher then talked about his work for Netflix, and brought up the subject of Mindhunter – an expensive period piece about the formation of the FBI’s criminal profiling unit. Compared to House Of Cards – the hit political drama that helped make Netflix the streaming giant it is today – the more austere Mindhunter was a far more risky proposition.
“Maybe House Of Cards wasn’t a huge risk, but Mindhunter was,” Fincher said. “A procedural [drama] on behavioural 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.”
It was that expense, Fincher said, that prompted Netflix’s executives to deliver an ultimatum: either cut the budget and make the show more cheaply, or rework it to make it less disturbing and more palatable for a mass audience – or ‘pop’, to use Fincher’s own term.
Said Fincher, “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 pop, so that more people will watch it. We did not want to change our approach so, respectfully, they told us that they were drawing a line under it.”
As a result, Mindhunter’s second season, which streamed in 2019, was its last. Screenwriter Joe Penhall – who most recently wrote acclaimed wrestling drama The Iron Claw – has expressed his desire to the world he created with Fincher, but judging by the director’s comments in recent weeks, it sounds as though Netflix’s decision is final.
