Production notes

Documentarian Lance Oppenheim first became aware of Chris Hansen and his show To Catch a Predator through parodies in other shows such as South Park. In March 2024, Oppenheim's wife, Abbey Rowe, hired Hansen to film a Cameo video to congratulate Oppenheim on his 2024 documentary film Spermworld, which is when Oppenheim began to believe Hansen had developed into a "strange, performative version of himself". Hansen promoted his own content in the video to Oppenheim, prompting Oppenheim to view Hansen's other Cameo videos, saying "[in] one, he called somebody a certified 'flex offender' instead of a certified sex offender. I was like, this is so weird—you can pay him $30, and he’s going to pretend you’re a child predator and then wish you happy birthday. What happened to the Chris Hansen I grew up with? Or was this always the Chris Hansen who existed?" Oppenheim retrospectively called Primetime an "adaptation" of that video. Two weeks after Oppenheim received the Cameo that Hansen recorded for him, Oppenheim, while meeting with Robert Pattinson and producer Brighton McCloskey for an unrelated project, showed them the Cameo as spurred by what Oppenheim described as an "intrusive thought"; a month later, Pattinson and McCloskey came across a draft of a To Catch a Predator screenplay written by Ajon Singh while looking for scripts to produce for their production company Icki Eneo Arlo. It compelled Pattinson to join the project as producer and approach Oppenheim to direct, calling Oppenheim's directorial style "perfect" for it. Oppenheim considered making a film about Hansen ever since receiving his Cameo, but dropped the idea when he heard David Osit was already producing a documentary about Hansen called Predators. Singh's screenplay, however, changed Oppenheim's mind, with him reflecting that "[Singh] tapped into something that was so up my alley, that felt closer to a fever dream than it did like a conventional biopic ... I [had] to drop everything. This is destiny."

Over three years prior to Primetime, the 2007 Esquire article "Tonight on Dateline This Man Will Die" by Luke Dittrich, which details the circumstances behind Conradt's suicide and the botched To Catch a Predator sting operation that attempted to confront him, was optioned by Dittrich to William Iannaccone, a producer at Range Media Partners. In 2023, Ajon Singh, a freshman screenwriter, got into contact with Iannaccone through a mutual friend at the Creative Artists Agency, who introduced Singh to Dittrich's article. Singh, intrigued by the concept, agreed to write a screenplay based off Dittrich's article, completing the script in two weeks after researching the show and Hansen for months prior. His screenplay was originally titled To Catch a Predator, directly off the show itself. Singh said he was "not really interested in a biopic" and instead "wanted to create something heightened, stylized and subjective, dancing on the line between reality and spectacle". According to Singh, his initial first draft was met with a "'sobering' marketplace" due to its controversial subject matter. After months of uncertainty regarding the viability of the project, Pattinson got possession of the script and expressed an interest in producing it to Singh, reviving it; Singh, unsure of how the script ever reached Pattinson, named Tyler Falbo, a member of the sketch group Almost Friday, as potentially responsible for passing it along to Pattinson or his producing partner McCloskey at some point. For the segment in the film where Hansen recounts investigating a string of child disappearances in India, Singh cited a 1990s article by The New York Times as inspiration. As is depicted in the film, one child each was stolen from villages in Uttar Pradesh; due to nobody being able to solve why it was happening or who was the perpetrator, mob justice took hold. Singh said he "thought that was a really strange story from a reputable news source" and "felt so compelled to do something with it" and chose to combine it with Hansen's real-life investigations of child exploitation in India from the same time period, to give Hansen's "mythical hero" a "mythical villain" to contend with.

In October 2024, it was officially announced that Oppenheim would make his narrative feature film debut using Singh's script, with A24 financing and distributing and Pattinson and Ari Aster producing; Pattinson was rumored to star as the film's lead, but went unconfirmed. The project's plot was given as "a journalist who takes on an underworld of crime and changes television forever", with speculation that it was based on Hansen and To Catch a Predator. Pattinson resisted starring in the film at first but was convinced by the "compelling" version of Hansen Singh and Oppenheim crafted. Singh reflected "we had this fateful dinner at Rob's house ... [Rob] talked about how he would run around the Silver Lake Reservoir listening to Chris Hansen's podcast and he was reciting lines from the script ... so I rewrote the character in five days and we sent the script back to Rob and we were like, 'Here's the version. If you don't like it, we'll go fuck ourselves. But this is the version we think that you could act in.' And he took the weekend and he got back to us and he said, 'Let's do it.'" Singh credited Pattinson's inclusion for the film's greater emphasis on including a "mystical angels and demons sort of element". In December 2024, Singh met with Pattinson and Oppenheim over Zoom to further refine the film's screenplay ahead of filming the next month. In October 2025, Singh called Primetime the most personally impactful project he had ever worked on.

Principal photography began in New Orleans under the production title Bluefin Tuna on February 10, 2025, and concluded by March 28. Oppenheim wanted to shoot Primetime on-location in his native Florida, but due to Louisiana's tax incentives it was chosen instead. Filming also took place in New York and Sri Lanka. The production spent $14.5 million in Louisiana. Primetime was printed entirely onto 16 mm film which was then digitized, creating a "layer of removal the scan supplied between the audience and the original image" as an attempt to capture the way To Catch a Predator is commonly viewed in the modern day. For the film's color palette, Oppenheim wished to avoid the "grayscale" of modern cinema and have Primetime harken back to the "saturated, almost pastel-like" look of 2000s television as overseen by colorist Damien Vandercruyssen, citing The O.C. and Smallville as visual templates he hoped to emulate. Seeking to authentically capture the sting operations for Primetime, Oppenheim consulted with Mitchell Wagenberg, a veteran camera operator within the television industry who worked on the original To Catch a Predator series, who recommended use of a Sony Plumbicon, a "novelty" video camera tube from the 1980s that had long since been discontinued. The Plumbicon the film crew were able to find had deteriorated in quality, but to an extent Oppenheim approved of due to its "dreamlike" quality originating from its "tubes [having] been burnt to a crisp, so every time we turned the camera on it would distort the images. It almost looked like a nuclear explosion had been set off right in front of us, and I loved that about it". Daniel Garber, the film's editor, was brought on in the early stages of development for Primetime, prior to the commencement of principal photography. Garber described the process of editing Primetime as "very complicated" due to the film's varied stylistic choices that combine several methods of filming, including "degraded, grungy-looking" DV footage, surveillance video meant to replicate the show itself, traditional digital cinematography which added a "fantastical and hallucinatory" aura, among others. Oppenheim prescribed different "psychological formats" to the various camera types used when shooting Primetime, positing that when the film was shot in DV footage it was "objective" or when it was shot with the Plumbicon or a digital camera it respectively became a "full expression of [Chris Hansen's] id" or "superego". Altogether, Primetime's cinematographer David Bolen used 12 different camera formats during filming. Garber cited Oliver Stone's JFK as a point of inspiration for both Oppenheim and him, specifically "[the] kinds of rhythms they were able to find—even within really disparate pieces of footage—and [how they were able to draw] something more fictional out of real-world events." For the moment in the film when Hansen and his crew discover the identity of their "whale", the filmmakers used a tiny camera made for colonoscopies and shot it traveling through a "mini-LED tunnel on a rotating gimbal that had spinning lights" which landed on Pattinson's face at the end to visualize the effect of "the camera [moving] through [a] computer". Bolen was worried if A24 would approve the use of his footage due to the colonoscopy camera's native resolution being in 480p, but they were ultimately given full permission to incorporate it, which Bolen was thankful for, calling it his favorite part of the movie. According to Garber, Primetime originally ended during the immediate aftermath of the raid on Conradt's home, with Pattinson's Hansen "stuck in this loop doing these incantations, repeating the chat logs". Gisondo suggested they add a follow-up with Dan one year later to Oppenheim, showing Dan getting his SAG card, to add "a sense of closure" for his character. Oppenheim agreed and convinced Singh to write an additional scene to bookend the film. Oppenheim said that just as his documentary films Some Kind of Heaven and Ren Faire explore themes of power in The Villages and Renaissance fairs, respectively, Primetime explores power dynamics in the realm of broadcast television:

I think, thematically, a lot of the ideas of power, and how power is obtained, and how power is maintained, and what happens when you have it, and what happens when you don't have it—I think these are kind of constant. They're perennially fascinating subjects, but I think I like looking at that lens and kind of applying it to—whether it's the Renaissance Fair or The Villages or broadcast television with the film I just made—I think there's a lot of overlap with a lot of the subjects. Hansen was not involved with the production, with Oppenheim saying "I felt like I had everything I needed with the Cameo." Nathan Fielder, described as a "great creative mentor" of Oppenheim's by Singh, watched cuts of the film and gave advice during production, which earned him a "special thanks" inclusion within the film's end credits.

Ari Balouzian composed the film's score, while Bridgers contributed the single "On Video", which plays over the end credits for Primetime. Having composed for Oppenheim's previous projects, such as Some Kind of Heaven and Ren Faire, Balouzian would create 24 individual score pieces for the film's soundtrack, with his track "Savior" showcasing alongside "On Video" as an end credits feature. Pattinson listened to the soundtrack while filming to help get into character. Speaking to The Line of Best Fit in September 2026, Balouzian stated that he "started working on Primetime after reading the script, and had access to the dailies while they were shooting, so the process started super early". As described by NME, Bridgers's "On Video" works to "draw on elements of the original score for the film" featuring "a softer opening [building] into heavier, distorted guitar textures before settling back down." She performed the single as part of The Lost Tour, which coincided with the release of Primetime. She also performed "On Video" for A24's Sound Check at Cherry Lane Theatre series as a live performance directed by Oppenheim, featuring Ethan Gruska on piano and Bridgers in front of a backdrop of TV sets, which had been filmed in September and released on October 9. The soundtrack released alongside the film on September 25, 2026, published by A24 Music. The track "Savior" dropped prior to the soundtrack on September 11.

In the United States and Canada, Primetime was released alongside Heart of the Beast, Forgotten Island, and the re-release of Avengers: Endgame, and was projected to gross $17–20 million in its opening weekend. The film went on to debut to $19.2 million from 2,863 theaters, becoming the third-best opening weekend for A24, behind Backrooms ($81.4 million) and Civil War ($25.5 million). In its sophomore weekend the film made $7.7 million (a drop of 59%) and then $4 million in its third weekend.

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 86% of 239 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 7.3/10. The website's consensus reads: "Turning the camera's scrutinizing eye back onto To Catch a Predator's journalistic legacy, Primetime interrogates the slippery boundary between justice and lurid spectacle with crackling style and an outstanding Robert Pattinson." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 67 out of 100, based on 49 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B" on an A+ to F scale, while 56% of those surveyed by PostTrak said they would definitely recommend it. Manohla Dargis for The New York Times praised Skyler Gisondo and Alex Winter for their respective roles, writing that they helped to give the film "emotion" and "push the movie into depths it doesn’t remain in" but otherwise felt that Primetime "looks good and moves well, and the dark, saturated colors and visual grittiness add some fine Expressionistic texture. Yet it’s hard to know to what end, or to care." Nicholas Barber of the BBC gave the film 5 out of 5 stars, calling Pattinson's performance "extraordinary" and "the best performance yet from the most intriguing actor of his generation". He described Pattinson as "completely immersed in the character's strangeness" and his approach to the role as "exaggerated and theatrical without ever being arch." While finding "nothing radical" about the film's message, Barber praised Oppenheim's direction for "[dropping] us into the middle of a fever dream in which everything is wholly believable yet unsettlingly weird", calling the film "not a straightforward drama, but a heightened, hallucinatory black comedy." David Rooney of The Hollywood Reporter called the film "a morbidly fascinating inquiry into performative justice, moral superiority and public shaming as crude fuel for reality television". He called Pattinson "riveting" and praised the supporting performances of Phoebe Bridgers, Gisondo, and Merritt Wever, but found the film's screenplay "a tad heavy-handed in making Hansen a borderline-unhinged egomaniac from the start". Jessica Kiang of Variety praised the "dazzling" cast for delivering "revelatory" and "career-best" work, writing, "there are really no weak links in the chain of performances here". She called Pattinson's impression of Hansen's voice and physical mannerisms "uncanny" and also praised Wever ("absolutely blistering"), Gisondo ("moving"), and Bridgers, whose performance she considered "the second of the film's most impressive transformations". Kiang also commended the film's craft, including the cinematography, which she described as "greasy, saturated images, so livid with grain that it feels like they leave dirt under your fingernails", as well as the "throbbing, queasy score" and the "inspired, [...] often very witty editing". Ryan Lattanzio of IndieWire gave the film a B; he considered the "exuberance" of Oppenheim's direction to be the film's "primary allure", noting its "tweaked-out style and sleazy/douchey vibe of early-2000s videotape and closed-circuit four-quadrant TV." Lattanzio wrote that the film begins with "Hansen's sordid personality already baked in", feeling Pattinson played the character as "someone visibly diseased in the head from the very top". Nick Schager for The Daily Beast wrote that "Primetime has nowhere to go but pure luridness" and criticized Pattinson's performance, saying "[there] isn’t a single moment when Pattinson’s Hansen resembles a real-life human being; though his accent is spot-on, his mannered speech, deliberate movements, unhinged glares, and affected smiles turn him into a cross between Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer and Heath Ledger’s Joker." Some critics unfavorably compared the film to David Osit's 2025 documentary Predators, which also chronicles the production of To Catch a Predator. Rooney wrote, "While Osit’s doc contemplated what the collective thirst for justice and appetite for televised humiliation might say about the American public, Primetime never digs that deep, which made me question what this flashy but shallow movie hopes to achieve." Matt Brennan of the Los Angeles Times found the film "remarkably incurious about To Catch a Predator and its consequences", writing that Oppenheim's "lurid" style caused the film to "[stumble] into some of the very same gutter sleaze tactics as the original series." He criticized the film's focus on Hansen himself as thematically limiting, writing: "Primetime isn't a Chris Hansen hit piece. In fact, it's so in love with its flawed protagonist that it can't see he's the least compelling character in the movie, an ambitious, arrogant, grasping, unscrupulous man we've met countless times before." Both Brennan and Lattanzio felt the film offered "little insight" into Hansen and To Catch a Predator that was not already covered in Predators. Osit was asked to view a cut of Primetime prior to its release, calling it "probably one of the most interesting professional experiences of my life, sitting and watching that film" and saying it was "fascinating to watch."

The Primetime crew did not consult Hansen during production. Hansen said he learned about Primetime in late 2025, and that he was informed that Oppenheim intended it as a "love letter to [him]"; Oppenheim disputed this in an interview with the Columbia Journalism Review. When asked about it in May 2026, Hansen said, "they reached out to me this week, and I've been asked not to talk about it a great deal at this point." Of the trailer, Hansen said: "It looks very dramatic. I know [Pattinson] is a popular actor, and I know the director is a popular guy. I also have some questions: What's Hollywood's motive here?" He added that Pattinson's performance looked "almost vampirish", and that Pattison's imitation of his voice was "pretty good", if overly dramatic. On Jesse Watters Primetime, Hansen said a lawyer from A24 asked him before a private screening to sign a contract that would "take away his name, image, and brand, essentially, as well as any potential legal rights that would come out of the movie". Hansen refused to sign it after speaking with his lawyers. Variety reported that the agreement was a standard non-disclosure agreement (NDA) signed by preview audiences to prevent spoilers and protect A24's intellectual property. Hansen attested that Osit did not have to sign an NDA before he saw Primetime, and that the NDA included an agreement not to take legal action against A24. Hansen purchased pre-show advertising for every theatrical screening of Primetime. The ads show Hansen in a kitchen like the ones seen in his sting operations, asking the audience to "take a seat" before directing the audience to his streaming service TruBlu. Hansen wanted to end the advertisement with the disclaimer that Primetime is "a Hollywood fantasy version" of true events, but was advised against it to avoid potential legal action by A24. Hansen told the Columbia Journalism Review that he rejected involvement in a pitched promotional campaign: "[A24 seemed] eager to whore me out in a promotional campaign ... [all] this bullshit about Robert this and Robert that and 'We'll do a podcast, you can fly to London.' I don't care, honestly. I'm really fucking busy being the real Chris Hansen. It’s a seven-day-a-week job." In response to Hansen's criticisms, Oppenheim said he was "excited for him to have a seat and watch the movie in a movie theater, if that's where he chooses to watch it ... I'm excited to hear what he has to say about it." Hansen was critical of Primetime after seeing it: "Obviously I'm not objective because the character is, you know, me, but it was so detached from reality or anything I've experienced then or now doing the investigations. I'm not sure what the point of it was." He felt Primetime portrayed him in a "twisted, dark, [and] dishonest" manner and said the filmmakers were "just as big of predators as the people who get caught in these investigations". Oppenheim responded that Hansen was a "complicated hero", that he "wanted to show what the effects were on someone who does this work", and that Primetime "[isn't meant] to be representational of reality in any way." Hansen subsequently invited Oppenheim and Pattinson to appear on his podcast, Have A Seat with Chris Hansen.