Primetime

Premise

In 2006, To Catch a Predator host Chris Hansen sets out to make television history.

Cast

Robert Pattinson as Chris Hansen, a television journalist for NBC and host of To Catch a Predator

Pattinson initially joined Primetime only as a producer, before agreeing to star in the film's lead role, having to prep the film while also filming Die My Love and The Drama and preparing for a role in Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey. Pattinson said he first became familiar with To Catch a Predator while staying in the United States as he starred in the Twilight films. He called imitating Hansen's voice "incredibly difficult" and studied his appearances on podcasts, recounting how he would "wander around the streets saying what he's talking about" and confuse bystanders due to the dark nature of Hansen's work. Oppenheim has called Pattinson's Hansen in Primetime "a cross between Jerry Maguire and Dracula".

Merritt Wever as Andie Bender, Hansen's producer at Dateline NBC, who prioritizes the show's ratings above all else

Skyler Gisondo as Dan Plumb, a young aspiring actor hired for the show's sting operations

Gisondo's role is based on Dan Schrack, the decoy for the botched sting operation involving Conradt. Gisondo compared being starstruck by acting alongside Pattinson to Dan's admiration of Hansen, saying his "personal nervousness bled into it".

Phoebe Bridgers as Del Harvey, a young decoy who plays both boys and girls on the show

Bridgers knew Oppenheim before production of Primetime; he sought her out because he believed someone "who had such a deep speaking voice [that] could produce this beautiful, angelic singing voice" was perfect for the role of a decoy.

Matthew Maher as Xavier Von Erck, an online vigilante and the founder of Perverted-Justice

Bokeem Woodbine as Cortland Gunn, the Rockwall County chief of police

Production

In October 2024, it was announced that Lance Oppenheim would make his narrative feature film debut with a script by Ajon Singh, with A24 financing and distributing and Robert Pattinson and Ari Aster producing; Pattinson was also rumored to star as the film's lead, but went unconfirmed. The project's plot was given as "a journalist who takes on an underworld of crime and changes television forever", with speculation that it was based on Chris Hansen's show To Catch a Predator.

The film's connection to Hansen and To Catch a Predator was revealed in May 2026, when A24 released the film's teaser trailer and first poster with Pattinson playing Hansen. The film's accompanying logline said the film was set in 2006, which some publications recognized as the year Bill Conradt committed suicide, which contributed to the show's cancellation. Hansen was not involved with the production.

Oppenheim first played with the idea of Hansen having adopted a "strange, performative version of himself" after his wife, Abbey Rowe, hired Hansen to film a Cameo video for him to congratulate Oppenheim on having released his 2024 documentary film Spermworld. Hansen pitched ideas to him in the video. Oppenheim retrospectively called Primetime an "adaptation" of that video. He also said that just as his documentary films Some Kind of Heaven and Ren Faire explore themes of power in The Villages and Renaissance fairs, respectively, Primetime explores power dynamics in the realm of broadcast television:

I think, thematically, a lot of the ideas of power, and how power is obtained, and how power is maintained, and what happens when you have it, and what happens when you don't have it—I think these are kind of constant. They're perennially fascinating subjects, but I think I like looking at that lens and kind of applying it to—whether it's the Renaissance Fair or The Villages or broadcast television with the film I just made—I think there's a lot of overlap with a lot of the subjects.

Singh adapted the film's screenplay from the 2007 Esquire article "Tonight on Dateline This Man Will Die" by Luke Dittrich, which details the circumstances behind Conradt's suicide and the botched To Catch a Predator sting operation that attempted to confront him. Singh said he was "not really interested in a biopic" and instead "wanted to create something heightened, stylized and subjective, dancing on the line between reality and spectacle". According to Singh, his initial first draft was met with a "'sobering' marketplace" due to its controversial subject matter.

Release

Primetime premiered in the main competition of the 83rd Venice International Film Festival on September 5. It is scheduled to be theatrically released in the US on September 25. In April 2026, Indian streaming service Lionsgate Play announced that Primetime would be part of its initial batch of theatrical-first releases in September 2026. The film will release in the Benelux on October 29 and in France and Germany on September 23.

Reception

Critical response

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 94% of 32 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 7.6/10. Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 73 out of 100, based on 17 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.

Nicholas Barber of BBC gave the film 5 out of 5 stars, calling Pattinson's performance "extraordinary" and "the best performance yet from the most intriguing actor of his generation". He described Pattinson as "completely immersed in the character's strangeness" and his approach to the role as "exaggerated and theatrical without ever being arch." While finding "nothing radical" about the film's message, Barber praised Oppenheim's direction for "[dropping] us into the middle of a fever dream in which everything is wholly believable yet unsettlingly weird", calling the film "not a straightforward drama, but a heightened, hallucinatory black comedy."

David Rooney of The Hollywood Reporter called the film "a morbidly fascinating inquiry into performative justice, moral superiority and public shaming as crude fuel for reality television". He called Pattinson "riveting" and praised the supporting performances of Bridgers, Gisondo, and Wever, but found the film's screenplay "a tad heavy-handed in making Hansen a borderline-unhinged egomaniac from the start".

Jessica Kiang of Variety praised the "dazzling" cast for delivering "revelatory" and "career-best" work, writing, "there are really no weak links in the chain of performances here". She called Pattinson's impression of Hansen's voice and physical mannerisms "uncanny" and also praised Wever ("absolutely blistering"), Gisondo ("moving"), and Bridgers, whose performance she considered "the second of the film's most impressive transformations". Kiang also commended the film's craft, including the cinematography, which she described as "greasy, saturated images, so livid with grain that it feels like they leave dirt under your fingernails", as well as the "throbbing, queasy score" and the "inspired, [...] often very witty editing".

Ryan Lattanzio of IndieWire gave the film a B; he considered the "exuberance" of Oppenheim's direction to be the film's "primary allure", noting its "tweaked-out style and sleazy/douchey vibe of early-2000s videotape and closed-circuit four-quadrant TV." Lattanzio wrote that the film begins with "Hansen's sordid personality already baked in", feeling Pattinson played the character as "someone visibly diseased in the head from the very top".

Response from involved parties

When asked about the film after its teaser was released in May 2026, Chris Hansen said, "they reached out to me this week, and I've been asked not to talk about it a great deal at this point." In an interview after the first trailer was released in August, Hansen said he was not involved in the film's production, saying the filmmakers reached out to him the day before the teaser was released, and he was reserving judgment on the film until he saw it.

Of the trailer, Hansen said: "It looks very dramatic. I know [Pattinson] is a popular actor, and I know the director is a popular guy. I also have some questions: What's Hollywood's motive here?". He added that Pattinson's portrayal as shown in the trailer looked "almost vampirish", and that, while he believed it was overly dramatic, he and his family agreed that Pattison's imitation of his voice was "pretty good". Hansen also said he had once written his own biographical screenplay and expressed a preference for Denis Leary as the lead.

On Jesse Watters Primetime, Hansen said a lawyer from A24 asked him before a private screening of the film to sign a contract that would "take away his name, image, and brand, essentially, as well as any potential legal rights that would come out of the movie". Hansen refused to sign it after speaking with his lawyers and chose not to see the film. A source close to A24 told Deadline that the agreement was a standard non-disclosure agreement (NDA) signed by preview audiences to prevent spoilers and protect the studio's intellectual property. But Hansen attested that David Osit, director of the 2025 documentary Predators, did not have to sign an NDA before he saw Primetime, adding that the NDA included an agreement not to take legal action against A24 for the film's depiction of him, and that he was consulting with lawyers for recourse.

Hansen has purchased pre-show advertising for every theatrical screening of Primetime. The ads show Hansen in a kitchen like the ones seen in his sting operations, asking the audience to "take a seat" before directing the audience to his streaming service TruBlu. Hansen reportedly wanted to end the advertisement with the disclaimer that Primetime is "a Hollywood fantasy version" of true events, but was advised against this as it might prompt legal action by A24. In response to Hansen's criticisms, Oppenheim said in a September 2026 interview that he was "excited for him to have a seat and watch the movie in a movie theater, if that's where he chooses to watch it ... I'm excited to hear what he has to say about it."