Mindhunter director, executive producer and showrunner David Fincher has confirmed that the Netflix series will not return for a third season.
Based on the true crime book of the same name, the show first launched on the streamer in 2017. Set in 1977, it followed FBI agents Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff) and Bill Tench (Holt McCallany) as they attempt to get inside the minds of a serial killer – a completely new brand of murderer at the time.
A second season was released in 2019, with the series soon gaining a strong fanbase. However, despite the show’s popularity, plans for a third season were put on hold by Netflix in 2020.
Now, in an interview with French outlet JDD, Fincher has confirmed that the series won’t be returning.
“I’m very proud of the first two seasons. But it is a particularly expensive show and, in the eyes of Netflix, we did not attract a large enough audience to justify such an investment,” said the producer.
“I don’t blame them. They took risks to launch the series, gave me the means to do as I dreamed with Mank [his black and white movie set in Hollywood in the 1930s] and they allowed me to venture on new paths with The Killer [his upcoming crime thriller movie starring Michael Fassbender as a hitman].”
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Fincher’s comments will come as disappointing news to fans of the show, given that they were previously teased with a plan for the third season.
Last year, fellow series director Andrew Dominik, said that Holden Ford and Bill Tench were set to meet real Hollywood stars as they explored the making of classic serial killer films like Manhunter and The Silence Of The Lambs.
“What they were going to do with Season 3 was they were going to go [to] Hollywood,” Dominik told Collider.
“So one of them was going to be hooking up with Jonathan Demme [the director of The Silence Of The Lambs] and the other one was going to be hooking up with Michael Mann [Manhunter].
“It was all going to be about profiling making it into the sort of zeitgeist, the public consciousness. That was the season everyone was really waiting for them to do, when they sort of get out of the basement and start.”