Mindhunter Isn't Dead Yet: Movies Now on the Table
For everyone still mourning Netflix's decision to cut Mindhunter short, there's a flicker of hope — and it's coming straight from Holt McCallany himself.
In a recent interview with CBR, McCallany said he met with director David Fincher "a few months ago," and was told that Mindhunter could come back… as a trilogy of two-hour movies. Not a full-blown Season 3. But something.
"There is a chance that it may come back as three two-hour movies, but I think it's just a chance," McCallany said. "I know there are writers that are working, but you know, David has to be happy with scripts."
So yes — it's tentative. Fincher has famously high standards (and not much patience for weak scripts), but the fact that he's even entertaining the idea is more than fans have heard in years.
Mindhunter originally aired in 2017 and 2020, following two FBI agents and a psychologist in the late '70s as they pioneered criminal profiling by interviewing serial killers. Despite critical acclaim and a cult following, Netflix quietly let the show go in early 2020, releasing the cast from their contracts and shelving plans for Season 3.
At the time, Fincher told Variety:
"It was an expensive show. It had a very passionate audience, but we never got the numbers that justified the cost."
Translation: great show, not great ROI. And Season 2 had been a beast. Fincher reportedly fired the original showrunner, scrapped eight scripts and the entire show bible, and then moved to Pittsburgh just to wrangle the whole thing himself. The season, which focused on the Atlanta Child Murders, nearly broke him.
"It was exhausting," co-producer Peter Mavromates said. Fincher put it even more bluntly: "I'll admit I was a little bit like ‘I don't know that I'm ready to spend another two years in the crawl space.'"
Fair enough.
But now? The conditions might finally be lining up again. McCallany, who's back on Netflix this month with a new series called The Waterfront, said the potential Mindhunter movies would also be for Netflix, and that scheduling wouldn't be an issue — as long as Fincher feels good about the material.
"The sun, the moon, and the stars would all have to align... but it has to do, you know, with David really having the time and the inclination and being happy... with the material. And, you know, that's a big question mark."
In the meantime, McCallany and Fincher are already reuniting for another Netflix project — a Once Upon a Time in Hollywood spinoff movie about Brad Pitt's Cliff Booth. Fincher's directing from a Quentin Tarantino script, so that one's very much happening.