The upcoming film Primetime from A24 details the rise and fall of the hit series To Catch a Predator. The NBC series had host Chris Hansen using his team to try to catch men who are preying on underage children on the internet. Hansen’s team has a decoy messaging a man, set up a meeting, and Hansen steps in before the man is ultimately arrested. The show ended after one season after a case went awry in Texas.
Primetime stars Robert Pattinson as Hansen and it seems as if the real life man, who still does predator catching on his own shows, isn’t exactly happy about it. According to Deadline, Hansen said that he was potentially looking at taking legal action against the new film.
“People are looking at it,” he said on SiriusXM’s The Dan Abrams Show. “I don’t know. One guy told me, 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?’”
Hansen went on to talk about how he hasn’t seen the movie yet, saying, “And the thought process here is that, if you protest it too much, do they turn it into a promotional situation where, ‘this is the movie Chris Hansen doesn’t want you to see.’ Well, in reality, it’s the movie Chris Hansen hasn’t even seen yet, so it’s a hard question to answer.”
Chris Hansen hasn’t seen Primetime
Primetime is a fictionalized version of events. Pattinson’s Hansen obviously will take liberities because that’s the way that fiction works but the real Hansen doesn’t seem to be handling the film’s release well.
But then Hansen said something that, given what he is known for, is almost laughable. “It feels very exploitive to me,” he said. “It feels sneaky and disingenuous to me that they would do this and not even say, ‘This is what we’re doing.’” Hansen said this after the documentary Predators showed Hansen continuing to go after an 18 year old in high school who was attempting to date a younger male student, even when local pushback happened.
Hansen refused to sign an NDA that is relatively standard for early press screenings. “The lawyers at A24 wanted me to sign away my rights to my name, image and brand essentially, as well as any potential legal rights that would come out of the movie,” Hansen said. “I couldn’t sign that, so they didn’t show me the film. I went all the way over there.”
So, Hansen saying that he was looking into legal action for a movie that he hasn’t seen because he signed an NDA that is kind of standard. But still, what we do know about Primetime has clearly ruffled Hansen’s feathers.
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