87% on Rotten Tomatoes and one unhappy viewer: Chris Hansen has finally seen Primetime
The man the movie is about waited until opening day, sat down at a screening and walked out with a very different review from the critics. The same afternoon, a trailer for his own version of the story came out.
Chris Hansen has finally seen Primetime, the A24 film in which Robert Pattinson plays him during the To Catch a Predator years. On Friday, the day it opened, he posted a short video with his verdict, first picked up by Entertainment Weekly. Hansen was never consulted on the film and had skipped the early screenings because he refused to sign a nondisclosure agreement.
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Critics, meanwhile, have been kind. The film sits at 87% on Rotten Tomatoes, made $2.7 million from Thursday previews and is tracking toward more than $20 million for the weekend, per The Detroit News. Hansen watched the same movie and came out somewhere else entirely:
"It was so detached from reality or anything that I've ever experienced then or now, doing the investigations, I'm not sure what the point of it was."
He also allowed that he is "not objective, because the character is, you know, me," and called the whole thing "so bizarre." The full review is going on his podcast, Have a Seat With Chris Hansen, on Friday night.
He had a counter-programming plan ready
Hansen didn't just review the movie. The same day, his streaming network TruBlu released the trailer for I'm Chris Hansen, a documentary about and starring him that The Hollywood Reporter says has been three years in the making, so it is not a knee-jerk reply. He had already bought TruBlu ads to run ahead of Primetime screenings. The before-and-after of his position is short:
- Before seeing it — "a complete work of fiction attached to a real name," an "insult" to people who protect children and a film that turns their work into "essentially a horror film."
- On Pattinson — "a great actor and a nice guy," who was put "in a difficult position" by a studio that never contacted Hansen.
- After seeing it — "bizarre" and "detached from reality."
Pattinson's side of it
Pattinson has been asked about Hansen throughout the press tour. His answer to the AP was the closest thing to a rebuttal so far:
"The fact that people are still discussing the ethics of it, of a 20-year-old TV show, I mean, it's absolutely insane."
Both men are now arguing about the same 20-year-old show. Only one of them has a documentary about it to sell.
Previously we wrote: 'She went rogue': 911 audio from Tampa airport shows how long it took to find Milania Giudice
