As things stand, Netflix’s psychological thriller series Mindhunter exists on a strange plane. It hasn’t officially been canceled just yet, but the cast were let go from their contracts last year, so it’s clearly not a top priority for the streaming service.
However, David Fincher was heavily involved in the development and production of the show, to the extent that he directed seven of the nineteen episodes as well as taking an executive producer credit, while he now happens to be in the midst of a four-year exclusive development deal with Netflix.
The platform tends to give its contracted talents a lot more creative leeway than they’d find at any of the major studios, so if the acclaimed filmmaker decides he wants to add season 3 to his slate of projects, then it’s something the company would need to at least consider.
We’ve heard on a couple of occasions already that another run of Mindhunter may be in the works, and a new report intimates that talks are ongoing and slowly but surely moving forward, though there’s not a great deal of additional information made available. Of course, creator Joe Penhall is just as integral to the process as Fincher, so he’d likely have to agree a deal with Netflix, too, in order for it to get an official green light.
As always, though, Fincher has multiple titles in various stages of development including Michael Fassbender thriller The Killer and a third Love, Death & Robots anthology, both of which fall under his Netflix contract. Not to mention that one drawback is that the Se7en and The Game director admitted in the past that the viewing figures for Mindhunter didn’t justify the investment, and as we’ve seen with Jupiter’s Legacy, big budget shows need to pull in even bigger numbers to survive.