Find this story in your account’s ‘Saved for Later’ section.
Being a figure who gets the fictional Hollywood treatment is always an unnerving prospect, especially in an era when it’s increasingly uncommon for a subject to have no say in shaping their own portrayal. Especially when Robert Pattinson, who’s in the running to be the freakiest male actor of our generation, has been cast to portray you — or at least a character “inspired by” you who also happens to share your name (and most of your biography). And especially when it sure looks like he’s portraying you as a megalomaniacal television man increasingly drunk on his own growing fame and power in a movie that looks like a wackadoodle neon-fever dream.
That’s the predicament Chris Hansen finds himself in. Hansen was the host of To Catch a Predator, the mid-aughts Dateline segment in which he led a team that used law enforcement to lure and film online child predators in sting operations. He is the subject of A24’s Primetime, first announced in 2024 with Pattinson attached to star and documentarian Lance Oppenheim (Spermworld, Ren Faire) set to make his narrative-feature debut as director. Tagged “inspired by true events” and slated for release on September 26, following its Venice Film Festival premiere on September 5, the film is based on Luke Dittrich’s 2007 Esquire article “Tonight on Dateline This Man Will Die,” which chronicles the 2006 Predator sting in Texas that ended in tragedy. A24 dropped the first trailer on August 6, offering a glimpse of Pattinson’s thoroughly unhinged, high-voltage take on Hansen. “What you’re doing is more than acting,” he tells one of his decoys. “You’re cleansing the world of an ancient evil.” Faced with the impending prospect of such a portrayal — one that could lead to awards-season visibility for Pattinson — Hansen has unsurprisingly begun to assert some control over his narrative, or at least as much as he can.
After To Catch a Predator’s run originally ended in late 2007, Hansen stuck around NBC for a few more years until the network opted not to renew his contract in 2013. It didn’t take him long to return to his Predator concept, which has since grown into a sprawling digital-media operation including a podcast, a series, and a direct-to-consumer streaming service called TruBlu, which packages his particular brand of predator-hunting entertainment. He pops up at events like CrimeCon to hold court as an elder statesman of the modern true-crime economy, with all the moral, ethical, and capitalistic dicey-ness it represents. Primetime gives him something he hasn’t had in a while: a Hollywood-size spotlight on the Chris Hansen brand. And he seems game to squeeze every drop of juice out of it.
Below, a timeline of Hansen’s responses to the movie he, as of this writing, still hasn’t seen.
Hansen’s first known response to Primetime arrived during a May 29 sit-down with NewsNation’s Jesse Weber, recorded in Las Vegas at this year’s CrimeCon convention, where Weber dubbed Hansen its “de facto mayor.” The conversation covered several topics, but Weber briefly sidestepped to ask Hansen about the teaser A24 had released a few days earlier. “What? There’s a movie trailer? What will they think of next?” Hansen responded, sounding less than enthused. The teaser offered only fleeting glimpses of the film, with Pattinson — “He’s an actor, right? Young, talented guy?” Hansen asked — narrating as a fictionalized version of the Predator host.
Hansen was noticeably circumspect here. When Weber asked whether he knew a film about him was in the works, he replied, “We had heard that there was something like this in the works. They reached out to me this week, and I’ve been asked not to talk about it a great deal at this point. But I’ll come back on, and we’ll talk about it.” The conversation then abruptly pivoted to Jeffrey Epstein.
Hansen started talking a great deal about Primetime a few months later during an appearance on Serialously, the true-crime podcast and YouTube show hosted by Annie Elise, better known as the host of 10 to Life. By this point, Primetime had received a sustained jolt of attention from its first full trailer, and Elise asked Hansen how he felt about the project:
Elise: Obviously Primetime is coming out with Robert Pattinson starring as you, which is crazy to think, I imagine? What was it like getting that call? Not only that they were going to be doing a movie, but also that he was going to be playing you.
Hansen: Well we had heard, you know … Obviously with all the different properties I have and all the platforms, some of the people who are involved in the management also tangentially have relationships in the Hollywood world. So we had heard that this was in the works. A couple months ago, they came out and said, “Hey look, we’re doing this. We’d like you to, you know, have some sort of consideration in terms of helping us with this.” I haven’t seen it.
Elise: Did you sit in on any of the filming or work as a consultant or anything?
Elise: So they put together their whole story line just independently.
Hansen: They did. And then came to me. Correct.
Hansen noted that the studio was planning a “private screening” for him, so until he got a chance to watch it, he was mostly withholding judgment. “My suspicion is that they used my name because it helps in a commercial enterprise,” he said. “As a reporter, it’s sort of silly for me to talk about something that I haven’t seen yet. So I’m gonna see it.” His thoughts on the trailer? “It looks very dramatic.” But beyond that, he professed skepticism about the whole enterprise: “I also have some questions here. What’s Hollywood’s motive here? We don’t know, but I’ll find out.”
There was one thing about Primetime that Hansen seemed genuinely disappointed by: He hadn’t gotten to make his own version of his life story. He claimed that years earlier, he had written a script and envisioned a very different leading man. “I didn’t get to choose my own guy,” he told Elise. “Years ago, I had crafted a script and thought Denis Leary would be a good guy to play me, depending on the age of it all.”
