Hope For ‘Mindhunter’ Season 3 On Netflix Is Dead After A Departure

Netflix fans believe that ‘Mindhunter’ is one of the services best series ever, but it will not return for season 3 without question, given recent news.

Netflix

Even if the New York Times left it off its Best TV Shows of the 21st Century list, it’s well-established among Netflix viewers that Mindhunter, the two-season crime drama, is one of the service’s best series ever. Now, hopes that have spanned seven years, that someday the show would resurface for season 3 after a cliffhanger finale, are now in a nailed-shut coffin.

It has just been announced that after 13 years, David Fincher is exiting his deal with Netflix. That will occur after his upcoming film, The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth, the sequel to Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, which is out in theaters on Nov. 25, 2026, and on Netflix on Dec. 23, 2026.

As for Mindhunter, while it was created by Jon Penhall, David Fincher effectively served as the showrunner and directed a large number of episodes. There’s no chance it would return without him, even if he has expressed interest in the past. In an interview back in 2020 with Variety, he talked about how there was a plan to continue Mindhunter into season 3 and beyond:

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

However, Fincher also lamented exhausting 90-hour work weeks to make the series, and said Netflix was unlikely to approve it given its high cost to relative viewership. But six years later, Netflix is certainly no stranger to extremely high costs for far worse series. Still, it’s over. No chance now.

David Fincher was pretty much the launchpad for Netflix original content on the streaming service with his role in bringing House of Cards to life as a producer and director in 2013. From there, he made movies like Mank and The Killer for Netflix, the former landing a pair of Academy Awards. Now, Cliff Booth, fulfilling a three-movie contract he signed in 2020.

There is no word on why this deal specifically ran its course without being renewed again, but after 13 years, you might imagine Fincher may want to direct his time elsewhere. His last Netflix project was meant to be a role in making Squid Game: America, the spinoff of the hugely popular Korean series, but eventually that fell apart and will not move forward.

We will see how Cliff Booth goes and if Fincher can go 2-for-3 with his Netflix movies (sorry, but I really did not like The Killer). Then, we’ll learn what he’ll do elsewhere after that.

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