A24 has released the official trailer for Primetime, giving audiences their most extensive look yet at Robert Pattinson’s transformation into television journalist Chris Hansen.
Set in 2006, the film revisits the period when Hansen and NBC’s Dateline turned undercover investigations of suspected online predators into one of the most talked-about television formats in America.
Pattinson portrays Hansen at the height of the phenomenon, when To Catch a Predator was rapidly evolving from an investigative television segment into a national cultural event.
The concept became instantly recognisable.
Adults suspected of arranging meetings with minors online would arrive at carefully prepared houses, only to be confronted by Hansen and a hidden-camera television crew before law enforcement became involved.
But Primetime appears considerably less interested in simply recreating those famous confrontations than in examining what happened behind the cameras.
The trailer presents Hansen as an ambitious journalist who increasingly understands the extraordinary television potential of what his team has created.
Ratings rise. Public attention grows. The investigations become more elaborate.
And the boundary between journalism, law enforcement and entertainment becomes increasingly difficult to define.
At one point, Pattinson’s Hansen is already imagining the programme becoming something far larger than another Dateline segment. His determination to make television history becomes one of the central forces driving the story.
Merritt Wever plays a producer working alongside Hansen, while Skyler Gisondo, Phoebe Bridgers, Matthew Maher and Bokeem Woodbine also appear in the ensemble.
For Bridgers, Primetime marks a significant move into feature-film acting.
The film is directed by Lance Oppenheim, whose previous documentary work includes Some Kind of Heaven, Spermworld and the HBO series Ren Faire. Primetime marks his narrative feature debut, although the project appears closely connected to his established interest in unusual American subcultures, ambition and people constructing their identities in front of cameras.
Ajon Singh wrote the screenplay.
The story is inspired by true events surrounding Hansen’s investigations and the explosive popularity of To Catch a Predator, while also drawing attention to the growing controversy surrounding the programme.
That tension is evident throughout the trailer.
The people being investigated may be the obvious targets of Hansen’s work, but the film also asks uncomfortable questions about the machinery built around their exposure.
When does an investigation become entertainment?
How much does the presence of television cameras change the behaviour of everyone involved?
And what happens when the need to produce increasingly dramatic television begins influencing decisions that carry real-world consequences?
Pattinson’s performance appears designed around that contradiction.
His Hansen is controlled and recognisable when sitting across from the programme’s suspects, but the trailer reveals a considerably more intense personality once the cameras stop rolling.
The journalist understands that he has found something audiences cannot stop watching — and appears determined to push the format as far as possible.
Primetime therefore looks less like a conventional celebrity biopic than a media thriller about a specific moment in American television history.
The early 2000s created an environment in which reality programming, sensational news coverage and emerging internet culture collided. To Catch a Predator existed directly inside that intersection, turning disturbing real-world investigations into nationally watched television.
Its enormous popularity also generated arguments about journalistic responsibility, police involvement, entrapment, public humiliation and whether television networks had begun crossing a line between documenting events and actively creating them.
Those questions give Primetime a subject considerably larger than Chris Hansen himself.
It becomes a story about what audiences want to watch, what television is willing to provide and how quickly genuine investigative work can become part of the entertainment industry.
A24’s official synopsis keeps the premise deliberately simple: in 2006, To Catch a Predator host Chris Hansen sets out to make television history.
The trailer suggests that the consequences of achieving exactly that goal will form the darker side of the story.
Primetime arrives in US cinemas on September 25, 2026.
Watch the official trailer below.
