Robert Pattinson plays Chris Hansen as — and this is a direct quote from film critic Christian Toto's review — "a vain, selfish jerk who even exposes his young children." That's how Primetime, the new Hollywood film released Friday, chose to portray a man who spent years luring child predators into sting houses and confronting them on national television.
The predators, meanwhile, get the sympathetic treatment. One is shown on crutches.
Toto, who reviewed the film for his site, wrote that Primetime is "unabashedly one-dimensional in its critique" of Hansen and the To Catch a Predator operation. Hansen's investigative team is portrayed as creepy, aggressive, and far too eager for fame. The people they caught — adults who showed up to have sex with children — are depicted sympathetically by comparison. Toto described the experience bluntly: "I can't shake the horrible feeling this film gave me."
The film doesn't just question Hansen's methods. It reframes the entire enterprise. As one viewer on X put it, the movie wasn't just "a Chris Hansen character assassination, but a paranoid Reddit-tier indictment" of the whole effort to catch predators on camera. The message isn't subtle: the real problem wasn't the men who drove to a house expecting to meet a minor. The real problem was the guy with the cameras.
Toto asked the question the entire film refuses to answer: "Why would a major motion picture go out of its way to turn someone who helped catch child predators into the villain?"
We already know why. This is the same industry that sat on Harvey Weinstein's behavior for decades. The same town that gave standing ovations to Roman Polanski. The same ecosystem where Sound of Freedom — a film about child trafficking — couldn't get released because Disney, which held the rights, decided the movie wasn't "right for us."
Disney buried that film. Angel Studios picked it up and released it in 2023. It earned $184 million domestically — more than Fast X, more than Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, more than Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning. Audiences were starving for a movie that treated child exploitation as something to fight rather than something to contextualize. Hollywood's response wasn't to make more films like it. Hollywood's response was to make Primetime.
Angel Studios, meanwhile, has kept going. They released Young Washington on July 3, 2026. They've got Zero A.D.: The Birth of Christ coming Christmas 2026. Warner Bros., by contrast, has been canceling finished films — Batgirl, The Day That the Earth Blew Up, Coyote vs. Acme — while greenlighting a movie that asks you to feel bad for the guys who showed up to a sting house with a six-pack and a box of condoms.
The market already spoke. $184 million said audiences want stories about protecting children. Hollywood heard that number and decided to make a film where the protector is the problem.