Chris Hansen Calls Primetime Detached From Reality After Watching

Chris Hansen has finally watched Robert Pattinson play him in A24’s Primetime and remains unimpressed, calling the Lance Oppenheim-directed film “so detached from reality” and grading Pattinson’s performance a D, Rolling Stone and Forbes reported.

In a pre-taped podcast segment for Have A Seat With Chris Hansen, the former To Catch a Predator host is shown leaving a Times Square AMC after a Thursday night screening. “I can tell you that most of it is pure fiction. They mix in some reality here and there,” Hansen said, according to Rolling Stone. “At the end of the day, I wasn’t blown away by it either way. It’s a movie, and I’ll continue to do the work I do, and people can watch this movie and make up their own minds.”

Speaking further on his podcast and in remarks relayed by Forbes coverage of the film’s widening critical conversation, Hansen described Primetime as a “hit piece” on him and the Dateline franchise that made him famous from 2004 to 2007. He argued the movie insulted investigators who still chase predators and called a shirtless mirror-recitation scene involving Pattinson “absurd.”

Hansen also disputed Oppenheim’s framing of To Catch a Predator as a show clawing toward primetime relevance. “They made it look like this was a show that was kind of hovering in obscurity, and it was about getting on a primetime,” he said in the Rolling Stone account. “The show was always on primetime.” He claimed Oppenheim “wanted to create a horror-like film with interesting photography” and was uninterested in positive outcomes from the series’ two-decade run.

Primetime opened theatrically Friday after a Venice International Film Festival premiere earlier this month. Forbes noted the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer settled around the mid-80s after an opening burst near 93% from a small early sample, with audience scores also tracking in the low-to-mid 80s as more reviews landed. Hansen’s public rejection now sits beside that critical trajectory as the film’s most pointed real-life rebuttal.

For Hollywood readers, the clash is a familiar biopic hazard: a living public figure rejects a stylized screen version of his career while the movie courts awards-season curiosity. Hansen has already floated whether creative portrayals of identifiable public figures might invite legal theories beyond classic defamation, while acknowledging the high bar for such claims. No lawsuit has been filed in the reports cited here.

Pattinson’s casting as Hansen was always going to invite comparison to the host’s on-camera persona — calm confrontation, clipped questions, and the cultural afterlife of To Catch a Predator memes. Hansen’s D grade and “detached from reality” line give the film a ready-made adversarial quote in its opening weekend, whether or not that controversy helps or hurts ticket sales.

Verified facts as of Friday–Saturday reports: Hansen watched Primetime at a Times Square AMC on Thursday; he called most of it “pure fiction” and “so detached from reality”; he graded Pattinson a D; the film is directed by Lance Oppenheim and opened theatrically Friday after Venice; Forbes tracked the Tomatometer settling from an early 93% into the mid-80s as reviews expanded. Audience reaction and Hansen’s continued commentary will shape how Primetime is talked about beyond opening weekend.