The first trailer for Primetime, the biopic on To Catch A Predator host Chris Hansen, has just been unveiled, featuring Robert Pattinson in the starring role in Lance Oppenheim’s feature. Primetime will also star Merritt Wever, Skyler Gisondo, and Phoebe Bridgers, alongside Matthew Maher and Bokeem Woodbine.

Primetime takes us back twenty years, when Hansen is determined to make TV history with the controversial yet eye-opening, partially hidden camera show, To Catch A Predator. The series, which began as an NBC news segment, involves a dangerous sting operation luring predators to a house under the guise that they are about to meet a minor, only for Hansen and his team to bombard them, with the minor being an adult posing as younger over online messages.

David Corvo is credited as producer on the show, which garnered controversy due to the sparked debate on whether it made news rather than report it and potential violations of entrapment laws.

The show was ultimately cancelled in 2008, after two seasons, following the suicide of Bill Conradt, a Rockwall County, Texas, assistant district attorney, who was caught via the show talking to a volunteer posing as a thirteen-year-old boy.

But Oppenheim’s film will re-open the show’s presence in the darkest parts of our immediate world and the vigilante format it took, prompting audiences to reflect and ask questions. “What would have happened if I wasn’t here? You see how this looks, right?” the presenter asks. “At the end of the day, a man must be held accountable for the decisions that he makes. Would you agree?”

Hansen then emphasises that “there’s something you should know,” if you “watch television,” that he’s “Chris Hansen with Dateline NBC — and you’re able to be a part of television history.”

Watch more trailers here

The film, characterised as a biographical psychological crime thriller charting “a journalist who takes on an underworld of crime and changes television forever,” will mark Oppenheim’s feature narrative debut, following the 2020 documentary Some Kind of Heaven, 2024’s Spermworld and the HBO docuseries Ren Faire from 2024.

Primetime is set for a Venice Film Festival premiere in September, the film will get an Autumn UK and Irish cinema release date.

Post navigation