Robert Pattinson Is Chris Hansen in A24’s ‘Primetime’: First Trailer Revisits the ‘To Catch a Predator’ Reckoning

Lance Oppenheim’s narrative feature debut drags the 2006 peak of reality TV’s most notorious sting show back into the light. It opens in theaters September 25.

Robert Pattinson has spent the back half of his career collecting the strangest, most uncomfortable roles a movie star can find, and his latest may be the most unsettling yet. In the first trailer for A24‘s ‘Primetime,’ Pattinson disappears into Chris Hansen, the unnervingly calm anchor whose catchphrase and folder full of chat logs turned a Dateline NBC investigation into one of the most watched and most debated spectacles of the early internet age.

The setup is deceptively simple. A24’s official synopsis reads only that, in 2006, ‘To Catch a Predator’ host Chris Hansen sets out to make television history. What the trailer promises is less a biography than an autopsy, a look at the machinery humming behind the confrontations: the producers chasing ratings, the police departments folded into a broadcast, and the national appetite that made humiliation feel like justice. Pattinson, who also produces, does not appear to be doing an impression so much as inhabiting a man who believed completely in what he was making, which is a far more disturbing thing to watch.

The film marks the narrative feature debut of Lance Oppenheim, the documentary filmmaker behind ‘Some Kind of Heaven,’ whose nonfiction work has always been drawn to Americans performing curated versions of themselves inside artificial worlds. That instinct makes him an unusually apt choice for this material, because ‘To Catch a Predator’ was never simply journalism. It was theater with real consequences, and the question of where the reporting ended and the show began is precisely the fault line Oppenheim seems intent on standing on.

That history is worth remembering, because the film is arriving as the culture reassesses it. The program grew out of a 2004 Dateline segment in which Hansen, working alongside the online group Perverted Justice and local law enforcement, confronted men who had arranged to meet minors before police moved in. The confrontations became a phenomenon, endlessly rerun and, eventually, endlessly memed, but the fusion of newsgathering, policing, and entertainment raised hard questions about whether the show was documenting crimes or manufacturing them for the camera.

Those questions turned tragic in November 2006, when a Texas prosecutor named Bill Conradt, who had messaged a decoy but never traveled to the sting house, died by suicide as officers and an NBC crew arrived at his home. His sister sued the network, which settled in 2008, and the episode became the show’s permanent shadow. It was also the subject of Luke Dittrich’s 2007 Esquire article, ‘Tonight on Dateline This Man Will Die,’ one of the definitive reckonings with the program’s ethics.

Pattinson leads a formidable ensemble that includes Merritt Wever, Skyler Gisondo, Bokeem Woodbine, Matthew Maher and, in her dramatic feature debut, musician Phoebe Bridgers. A24 has kept most of their roles under wraps, disclosing little beyond Pattinson’s Hansen, a discretion that suits a story about how much of the truth stays off camera. The film is produced by Pattinson alongside Brian Kavanaugh-Jones, Fred Berger, Brighton McCloskey and Lars Knudsen, with Range Media Partners, Icki Eneo Arlo and Square Peg among the companies behind it. It premiered in competition at the Venice Film Festival and runs a lean 107 minutes.

‘Primetime’ also lands in conversation with David Osit’s 2025 documentary ‘Predators,’ which probed the same queasy fascination and the blurred border between accountability and appetite. The difference is that Oppenheim is working in fiction, which gives him license to enter the control room, the green room, and the private calculations that no camera crew ever captured. For an entertainment industry still addicted to true crime and still uncertain about its own complicity, that is a pointed place to aim, and Pattinson is exactly the kind of actor willing to make an audience sit in the discomfort rather than resolve it.

‘Primetime’ opens in theaters September 25 through A24.

Joanthan P. Moustakas

Jonathan P. Moustakas founded The Cinema Group in 2020 during the challenges of the pandemic, after losing the vital ability to find community in theaters and escape through the captivating magic of cinema. Feeling profoundly cut off from the vibrant film community he cherished, he sought to create a welcoming home for dedicated cinema fans while providing engaging, daily curated content that resonates with their passions. Years later, The Cinema Group has blossomed from a small collective of loyal fans into a thriving brand that reaches millions of audiences every month across a diverse array of platforms and mediums.

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