There’s good news and there’s bad news for David Fincher fans. The good news is that after his most recent film, The Killer, the director is developing a new series for Netflix.
The bad news is that it is an English language adaptation of the Korean phenomenon Squid Game, and not the one series we desperately want—Mindhunter season 3.
Kids, do you remember Mindhunter on Netflix? It’s fans haven’t known a moment’s peace since August of 2019, when the series’ second season ended, leaving the fate of a third season uncertain. Since then, every project that Fincher was involved in, probably every interview he did, he was hounded by questions about when we would be getting Mindhunter season 3. It wasn’t until early 2023 that Fincher, who was the showrunner and the series’ most frequent director, confirmed that the Jonathan Groff, Holt McCallany, and Anna Torv starrer was cancelled and would not be returning.
Fans had their answer, but the questions didn’t stop; they only multiplied. Nobody could fathom why this series, which followed the founding of FBIs Behavioural Sciences Unit in the late 70s and how they developed the process of criminal profiling, wasn’t being renewed despite delivering two tight and well received seasons. The show was clearly a hit amongst fans and critics alike, who were eagerly waiting for season 3. The groundwork for it was already laid in season 2 when Sonny Valicenti’s Dennis Radar made an appearance. The third season would follow the crimes of the BTK Killer. So what happened?
Earlier the narrative was that it was David Fincher who wanted to focus on other projects and revisit Mindhunter season 3 later. However, once it was confirmed that the series wasn’t returning, the Zodiac filmmaker insinuated that it was Netflix’s decision to not renew the show, even as he didn’t sound disappointed by it. The Gone Girl filmmaker told the French magazine Le Journal du Dimanche, “It’s a very expensive show and, in the eyes of Netflix, we didn’t attract enough of an audience to justify such an investment.”
You can imagine how fans of Mindhunter feel about the Squid Game development then, because it is a classic Netflix story, letting its marquee titles go on, while other smaller, better series are axed after sometimes a single season. Delaying Mindhunter was still justified as long as Fincher was working on original projects (like Mank, or The Killer, both for Netflix). But what is the point of creating an English version of Squid Game, when the original is already so widely popular despite being in Korean? It’s not like the language barrier has inhibited it from becoming a phenomenon. What’s the need?
As the news about Fincher’s Squid Game dropped, fans were unanimous in their sentiments on X. We wanted Mindhunter, not this!
Alas, gone are the days when series would get five or more seasons easily. The streaming services are running their own Squid Game where few fan favourite shows are able to survive beyond a first season. Whether Mindhunter will ever return to us is a mystery our heart doesn’t want to accept the answer to. You’d assume that loyal David Fincher fans to find their silver lining in the fact that it could be exciting to see what the filmmaker does with Squid Game. Only, that’s not exactly what they think about it.
Would you watch a David Fincher directed Squid Game or do you also wish he and Netflix were collaborating on Mindhunter or another original project instead?
Published: Oct 31, 2024 05:39 am