Chris Hansen bought a ticket to the movie about Chris Hansen, sat in a Times Square AMC with regular moviegoers, and gave Robert Pattinson’s performance a D.
The film
Primetime is an A24 narrative feature directed by Lance Oppenheim, in theaters September 25, 2026.
It is not a biopic in the ordinary sense. Reporting describes it as a dark meditation on performance, media and morality, closer to a fever dream than a life story.
What Hansen said
He gave his verdict on his podcast, Have a Seat with Chris Hansen, after watching it with a paying audience.
On the portrayal, he said the character is so detached from reality, from anything he has experienced doing the investigations then or now, that he was not sure what the point of it was.
On the accuracy, he was blunter.
98% of that movie that I just saw was pure fiction.
Chris Hansen
And on the grade itself, he allowed himself the obvious line.
Tough grade, but I’m kind of the only guy that counts in this one.
Chris Hansen
What everyone else said
Critics disagree with him sharply.
- 86% on Rotten Tomatoes, Certified Fresh, across 125 reviews.
- 84% audience score on the Popcornmeter from more than 100 verified ratings.
- Pattinson is drawing some of the best reviews of his career.
The critics’ consensus lands almost exactly where the film is aiming:
Turning the camera’s scrutinizing eye back onto To Catch a Predator’s journalistic legacy, Primetime interrogates the slippery boundary between justice and lurid spectacle with crackling style and an outstanding Robert Pattinson.
Rotten Tomatoes critics’ consensus
The opening weekend
The weekend is not closed yet, so these are previews and estimates rather than a final number.
- $2.7 million from Thursday previews.
- The fourth biggest opening day in A24’s history in North America.
- Opened at No. 2, behind Avengers: Endgame Encore.
- Tracking somewhere in the $17 million to $22 million range for the three-day weekend.
For an A24 release with no franchise behind it, built on a twenty-year-old cable segment, that is a large number.
The documentary that came first
Predators, directed by David Osit, premiered at Sundance in January 2025 and was released theatrically that September by MTV Documentary Films. It holds a 97% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and was a New York Times Critics’ Pick.
Osit was one of the millions who watched the show, and was disturbed by watching it as entertainment. The film:
- Shows raw unaired footage.
- Interviews Hansen.
- Interviews the adult actors who played the teenage decoys.
- Traces the copycats who turned the format into open vigilantism.
What the show was
To Catch a Predator ran on NBC from 2004 to 2007, as a segment of Dateline. Decoys posed as minors online, men arrived at a house, and Hansen walked out with transcripts.
It was enormously popular. It also ended badly. In 2006 a Texas prosecutor, Louis Conradt, shot himself as police and a camera crew arrived at his home. His family sued NBC and the case was settled.
The show did not return after that.
The BeezLoop Take
Hansen giving it a D is the most interesting review the film will get and it is also the least reliable one. He is the only person who cannot watch this movie as a movie. He is watching a stranger play him, in a story that argues the thing he is famous for was closer to spectacle than journalism. Almost nobody grades that fairly, and the line about being the only guy who counts gives away how personally he took it.
His factual objection deserves separating from his wounded one, though. Saying 98% of it is fiction is a claim about a film that never presented itself as reportage; Lance Oppenheim made something closer to a fever dream, and Hansen using that same phrase as an insult suggests he wanted a documentary and got a nightmare about the culture that made him. Those are different complaints and only the second one is really his to make.
Let us be clear about what these men were doing, because the revisionism runs both ways. They were arriving at houses expecting to meet children. Sympathy for them is not the point of either film and should not be the takeaway from this one.
The question the films actually raise is about us. A network built a hit show out of filming the worst moment of someone’s life, monetized it with ad breaks, and audiences watched it the way they watched sitcoms. The catching was real police work. The lingering close-up on a man’s face as he understood what was happening was not police work. That was the product, and tens of millions of people bought it weekly.
Conradt is the part that cannot be argued away. A man killed himself with cameras outside his door, NBC was sued, the case settled, and the show ended. Whatever you think he deserved, no court had said it yet, and a television producer is not supposed to be the one who decides. That is the whole case against the format in one incident.
The copycats are the legacy that actually matters now, and they are worse. The show taught a generation that confronting a suspected predator on camera is both righteous and lucrative, and the people doing it today have no lawyers, no police coordination and no editorial standards. Some have gotten the wrong man. Some have gotten people hurt. That is not an unintended consequence of the format, it is the format without the network’s liability department attached.
Two films in a year suggests the culture is finally ready to look at this, roughly twenty years late, which is about the normal lag. Worth asking what we are doing right now that will get the same treatment in 2046.
Was To Catch a Predator journalism, law enforcement, or entertainment wearing both as a costume?
Was To Catch a Predator journalism, law enforcement, or entertainment wearing both as a costume?
If the answer is the third, what does it say that it was one of the most popular things on television?
If the answer is the third, what does it say that it was one of the most popular things on television?
Related: more than half of people now post less than they used to, and what happens when bodycam footage becomes the whole story.
Sources: ABC News · Washington Times · Variety on the documentary · Film Forum
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