A24 released the first trailer for Primetime on Wednesday, the studio’s upcoming film about the origins of To Catch a Predator, starring Robert Pattinson as Chris Hansen, directed by Lance Oppenheim in his narrative feature debut and arriving in theaters in September 2026.
The trailer landed this morning and the combination of the subject matter, the cast, the studio and the director has the entertainment world paying close attention.
Pattinson as Hansen, sitting across the table from men who believed they were about to meet a child, asking that question in that voice, is the kind of casting that makes immediate sense and generates immediate discussion simultaneously.
The trailer leans into the Nightcrawler comparison that early descriptions of the film established, presenting the To Catch a Predator format not simply as consumer protection journalism but as a spectacle that Hansen constructed for television with his own specific ambitions animating every element of it. “In 2006, To Catch a Predator host Chris Hansen sets out to make television history.”
The film has no exact theatrical date beyond September 2026. A24 typically coordinates releases of this type with major fall festival appearances, Venice, Toronto or the New York Film Festival, so expect the conversation around Primetime to intensify significantly between now and whenever the premiere is announced.
What Is Primetime?
Primetime was announced in late 2024 with a logline that described “a journalist who takes on an underworld of crime and changes television forever” without confirming Hansen as the subject.
Pattinson’s involvement as both star and producer was the first indicator of the film’s scale and ambition.
When A24 and Oppenheim were attached, the project moved to the top of the most-anticipated list for anyone who watches what that specific studio is building.
Lance Oppenheim’s background is essential context for understanding what this film is likely to be.
He directed Some Kind of Heaven, the 2020 documentary about life inside The Villages, the massive Florida retirement community, and then Ren Faire for HBO in 2024, the documentary series about a Texas Renaissance festival that became one of the most discussed documentary subjects of recent years for the specific way it captured human ambition and delusion.
Oppenheim makes films about American spectacle, about the spaces where performance and reality collapse into each other and people make themselves into characters.
To Catch a Predator is exactly that kind of subject, and Hansen is exactly that kind of figure.
The screenplay comes from Ajon Singh. Cinematography is by David Bolen. The film was shot in New Orleans in early 2025 under the working title Bluefin Tuna, the kind of purposely obscure production title that A24 uses when it wants to keep a high-profile project from generating set photographs and location scouting attention before the official reveal.
The Show That The Movie Is About
To Catch a Predator aired as part of Dateline NBC from 2004 through 2007.
Its format was a specific kind of American television invention, law enforcement and Hansen’s production team would set up a sting house and use decoys to attract men who had been communicating online with what they believed were minors.
When those men arrived at the house, they would be confronted, on camera, live, with microphones and cameras everywhere, by Hansen, who would calmly walk out and begin the interview that made the segment. The confrontation was the product.
The show was enormously popular. The confrontations were dramatic in ways that satisfied something specific about the audience’s appetite for both crime journalism and televised public humiliation.
Hansen became one of the most recognizable faces on television during that period, known primarily for a single phrase, delivered in a specific measured tone, that remains among the most quoted on the internet nearly two decades later.
The show was also controversial in ways that Primetime appears to be engaging directly.
A 2006 incident in Kaufman County, Texas, ended with a Dallas County assistant district attorney committing suicide when police came to arrest him after he had been caught in a sting the show was conducting.
The Dateline crew had continued filming as the situation unfolded. NBC eventually settled a lawsuit with the man’s family and the show was quietly ended in 2007.
The specific question of where journalism ends and voyeurism begins, where public interest journalism ends and spectacle begins, has surrounded Hansen and the show since that incident.
The Nightcrawler comparison in Primetime’s early descriptions points directly at that question. Nightcrawler, the 2014 film starring Jake Gyllenhaal as a nighttime crime video stringer who goes increasingly far to get the footage networks will pay for, is a film about American media and the specific moral framework that makes someone willing to treat human suffering as content.
Primetime is apparently asking the same question about the To Catch a Predator format and the man who hosted it.
Robert Pattinson And The Year He Is Having
The trailer for Primetime arrives at a moment when Pattinson is in the middle of one of the busiest and most critically significant years any actor has had in recent memory.
He co-starred with Zendaya in The Drama, an A24 film that has been generating significant attention, and has Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey arriving in summer 2026.
Before the end of the year he will also appear in Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Three and Fernando Meirelles’ Here Comes the Flood alongside Denzel Washington. Primetime makes five major films in a single calendar year.
The trajectory Pattinson has been on since The Batman in 2022 and the series of A24 and prestige studio projects that followed is the specific kind of second act that the film industry produces occasionally for actors who were typecast early, in his case, by the Twilight franchise, and who spend the years after demonstrating a range that the earlier categorization obscured.
He has been working consistently with directors who challenge him. The decision to also produce Primetime, giving him creative stake in the project alongside the starring role, reflects an actor who is not just executing assignments but building a filmography with intention.
The casting of Pattinson as Hansen is the kind of choice that reveals something about what both actor and director are interested in.
Hansen is not a conventional biopic subject, not a president or a civil rights figure or a musician or an athlete.
He is a television journalist who built an enormously popular show around confronting men who believed they were meeting minors, and whose legacy is a genuine and unresolved conversation about what the show was and what it meant.
Playing that man requires engaging with the ambiguity rather than resolving it in either direction.
The Rest Of The Cast
The ensemble assembled around Pattinson is worth noting in detail. Merritt Wever is one of the most respected character actresses in television drama, her work in Nurse Jackie, Godless and Birdman has established her as someone who elevates everything she is in.
Skyler Gisondo has been building a quietly impressive film career through exactly the kind of off-center independent work that A24 specializes in.
Anna Faris, whose mainstream comedy career spans decades, brings a specific quality of recognition to whatever she appears in.
Phoebe Bridgers is the casting decision that will generate the most external attention from non-film audiences, the musician, whose albums Stranger in the Alps and Punisher made her one of the most celebrated singer-songwriters of her generation, has been appearing in film projects with increasing frequency and her presence in a project of this profile suggests a role of some significance rather than a celebrity cameo.
Lars Knudsen, Ari Aster’s producing partner, is one of the producers alongside Pattinson, a connection that places Primetime within the specific A24 horror-adjacent prestige ecosystem that Aster’s Hereditary and Midsommar established.
Oppenheim’s sensibility is different from Aster’s, but the institutional relationship between that producing team and A24’s distribution arm has produced reliably interesting films.
September And What Comes Before It
Primetime arrives in theaters in September 2026, no exact date confirmed.
The fall theatrical season is where A24 deploys its prestige films, and Primetime has the profile of a film that will compete for year-end awards conversation alongside its theatrical run.
September also positions it for major festival premieres, Venice begins late August, Toronto opens early September, and the New York Film Festival runs in October.
Any or all of those could serve as Primetime’s formal introduction to critics and industry audiences before its theatrical opening.
The trailer is out today. The conversation about Robert Pattinson as Chris Hansen, about what the film is saying about the man and the show and the American television moment it represents, has begun. September is four months away.
