David Fincher Reflects on Why Netflix Cancelled Mindhunter

David Fincher’s partnership with Netflix goes back more than a decade, and while the collaborations with the studio have seemingly been successes for both parties, Fincher’s Mindhunter series was cancelled by the streamer after two seasons. This didn’t sour his relationship with Netflix at all, as he recently looked back on how the subject matter of the series wasn’t the pop-friendly tone of other true crime series and the nature of its setting made it an expensive show for the streamer to produce. Fincher is no stranger to making disturbing experiences, having recalled that he had a similar experience releasing Seven.

“Maybe House of Cards wasn’t a huge risk, but Mindhunter was. 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?” Fincher shared with Premiere magazine, per FincherAnalyst and translated from French. “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.’”

He 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!’”

Making the cancellation all the more disappointing to fans was knowing that, having been based on real-life serial killers, Season 3 was expected to explore Dennis Rader, a.k.a. the BTK Killer, who had been teased throughout the first two seasons.

“At some point, I’d love to revisit it,” Fincher admitted to Variety back in 2020. “The hope was to get all the way up to the late ’90s, early 2000s, hopefully get all the way up to people knocking on the door at Dennis Rader’s house.” 

Stay tuned for possible updates on the future of Mindhunter. 

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