Chris Hansen finally sees Primetime — and questions its point

Chris Hansen has finally watched himself on the big screen, and he is not a fan.

The former To Catch a Predator host shared a video on X on Friday, 25 September, after catching Primetime, the A24 drama now playing in theatres in which Robert Pattinson plays him, directed by Lance Oppenheim, as reported by Deadline. He did not hold back.

Hansen called the film “so bizarre and so in-and-out of reality” and “so detached from reality”. He added, “I’m not sure what the point of it was,” in remarks covered by the Detroit News. He also said he is “not objective” about the film because the character at its centre is him.

That lack of distance has been the story for months. Pattinson said at the premiere at the Venice Film Festival that he hoped Hansen would see the film as “some kind of compliment”. Hansen, by contrast, earlier described the project as an “insult”, in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter.

The road to this screening was tangled. Hansen said he refused to sign an NDA, a non-disclosure agreement limiting what he could say afterwards, for an advance viewing and was therefore not allowed in. He had also contemplated legal action over the portrayal. Then he bought advertising time before Primetime screenings to promote TruBlu, his own true-crime streaming network.

Primetime is built around the Esquire 2007 article “Tonight on Dateline This Man Will Die” and its depiction of Hansen during his network sting-show years. Alongside Pattinson, the cast listed by A24 includes Merritt Wever, Skyler Gisondo, Phoebe Bridgers, Matthew Maher and Bokeem Woodbine. Hansen had earlier congratulated Oppenheim on his documentary Spermworld and told him to “have a seat”, a nod to his famous catchphrase.

What makes this stand out is how the argument became part of the release. A subject who would not sign, then bought ads, then reviewed the film himself. For fans, this means the off-screen back-and-forth is now running alongside the cinema run.