Photo: MTV Documentary Films/YouTube/A24

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? 

Hansen: No.

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.”

Three days later, Hansen had still not seen Primetime. He appeared on Jesse Watters’s Fox News show on August 20 sometime after his scheduled morning private screening at A24’s offices, which, according to him, never happened.

Hansen said that upon his arrival, the studio presented him with a much more expansive NDA than he was willing to sign. According to his account, he would have had to sign away the rights to his name, image, and “brand, essentially,” along with “any potential legal rights” that might arise from the film. “Who would sign something like that?” he asked. “It was a very restrictive agreement. I’ve never seen anything quite like it.” Hansen found it particularly strange given that, as he understood it, other people had already seen the movie without signing one. Hansen refused to sign it, so he was not admitted to the screening. “You and I are gonna have to go to the theater and see it when it comes out, I guess!” he told Watters.

Later that day, The Hollywood Reporter published reporting that conflicted Hansen’s account. The outlet learned that Hansen had been asked to sign a standard NDA about a week before the screening, one that “all preview audiences must sign in order to watch an unreleased A24 film” to “prevent spoilers and protect the studio’s IP.” “Page Six” later confirmed THR’s reporting via a “studio source,” with the added detail that A24 “invited him to suggest edits to the contract.”

Competing narratives aside, what’s striking about Hansen’s appearances on both Serialously and Watters’s show is the extent to which he projects a genial disposition about all this — as if it was all a funny, weird thing happening that’s an amusing distraction from his doing his real work: “I’ve been busy being the real Chris Hansen,” he told Elise, “so I don’t have a lot of time to focus on the fake Chris Hansen in the movies.” Which plugs directly into …

Say one thing about the guy: He knows an opportunity when he sees one.

On August 26, THR reported that Hansen had purchased preshow advertising on every theater screen showing Primetime, with the ads promoting TruBlu. The spot, which is viewable in the THR write-up, places Hansen in his natural habitat: a nondescript suburban kitchen where he pops out of a corner, addresses the audience directly, and makes the case for the continued relevance of his work. “I’ve spent decades working with law enforcement to catch predators before they exploit our children,” he says in the ad. “Now there are more platforms than ever before where this disturbing crime is being committed. And we are there to take down the predators.” A QR code directs viewers to TruBlu. THR also reported that Hansen wanted to include a kicker to the spot noting that Primetime is “a Hollywood fantasy version” of events, but the line was ultimately struck over concerns of “blowback” from A24.

An escalation. The same THR story that broke the news of the ad buy noted that Hansen is “now consulting attorneys about his options,” and then the following day, “Page Six” put a finer point on it: Hansen is “open to the possibility of suing” over the film, depending on how he is portrayed. Here, Hansen’s complaint seems less an outright declaration of war than a demand for recognition. “At this point it’s about courtesy,” he told “Page Six.” “If you make a movie using someone’s name and likeness, you’d think you’d reach out to them about it.”

But during an appearance on SiriusXM’s The Dan Abrams Show released the same day, Hansen went further. “I got a call from one of my producers, or the main producer on that series” — portrayed by Merritt Wever in the movie — “who was upset the other day because it cast her in a negative light,” he told Abrams, a former NBC colleague. “She was seen doing things in the trailer that she had never done. And what upset her most was, they had me yelling at my team, which I had never done in 45 years of being a television reporter. So there are a lot of negative things in there that aren’t true.”

Hansen also offered more details about his interactions with A24 and the NDA he refused to sign. He said the studio first contacted him on May 27, the day before the teaser was released, to express interest in his involvement in promoting the film, including through advertising on TruBlu. He told Abrams he later learned through a “third party” who had a relationship to Oppenheim that the director had not contacted Hansen because it was the studio’s responsibility and he didn’t think Hansen needed to be involved.

As for the NDA, Hansen said the studio emailed the agreement to him about a week before his scheduled private screening, and “multiple attorneys with great and vast experience in the Hollywood arena” advised him not to sign it or comment immediately. He later learned that David Osit, the filmmaker behind the documentary Predators, had seen the film without signing an NDA, further fueling his unwillingness to sign. He claimed that an A24 publicist told him that Pattinson and Oppenheim wanted him to be happy with the movie; in that case, he told Abrams, they should’ve reached out much earlier. “They were sneaky and disingenuous about it,” he said. “This is not art imitating reality. This is art exploiting the good work of somebody.”

As of August 28, Hansen is still on the fence about legal action. “One guy — somebody who’s very, very good at all this and very entrenched in entertainment law — he said, ‘You know, you can do that, and you probably have a decent case. How much time do you want to spend doing it?” he told Abrams. But given the fast and furious way he’s been litigating this in the court of public opinion, this could change quickly. Then again, Hansen is in a tricky situation. After all, there’s a thin line between reclaiming the narrative and triggering the Streisand effect.

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