Chris Hansen, the veteran true-crime television host best known for anchoring the controversial To Catch a Predator, has publicly trashed the Robert Pattinson–produced biographical drama Primetime with a D grade — and is now turning the spotlight onto his own upcoming documentary, I am Chris Hansen. The former cop and pop-culture icon watched the film in a New York Times Square theater alongside a live audience of regular moviegoers, and rather than being personally wounded by the dramatized account of his career, he said he was more baffled than anything. He then broke the news during an interview with fellow journalist Jesse Watters on Watters’ YouTube channel, revealing the title of his own project and describing the timing as “pretty good” for agents shopping it to platforms on the West Coast.
Hansen’s reaction to the film, which he described as an “overly-dramatized” and “fever dream”-like retelling of his life, centers on a peculiar paradox: the more detached the movie is from reality, the harder it becomes for him to feel genuinely offended. He praised Pattinson’s performance but argued that the actor’s portrayal of him deviated so far from who he actually is as a person that viewers were essentially watching a completely different individual on screen. “What was in it, in my mind, was something that was so overly-dramatized, so detached from reality — as the director put it, a fever dream — that almost hit me as something that was so far from reality that it wouldn’t even bother me,” Hansen explained. “I think other filmgoers will experience the same thing.”
A Hit Piece on a Cop Who Exposed Predators
For Hansen, the film reads less as a tribute to his career than as a pointed attack on the very work he did. He framed his job — and that of the thousands of men and women who pursued predators in his footsteps — as a public service aimed at protecting children. “In a way, it’s a hit piece on me and the series, which is weird, because all we do is expose bad human beings who try to hurt children,” he said. “So in that respect, it’s sort of an insult to the thousands of men and women who want, every day, to do the same thing that I try to do in Takedown and did in To Catch a Predator. It’s so far over the top that it’s hard to come to grips with what they’re trying to do here.”
“It’s a project, a film, in which I cooperated, produced by folks obviously I know and work with, and it was in the works well before we even heard of Primetime. It’s pretty good timing to have this thing out there with our agents shopping it on the West Coast to various platforms.”
Chris Hansen
Hansen singled out one particular scene for criticism: the moment in which Pattinson sits in front of a vanity mirror, shirtless, rehearsing what he plans to say to the supposed predators once they are on camera. He insisted that this sequence, like “almost every one” of the film’s other scenes, never actually happened. He also reiterated that he was never approached by A24 regarding the project, a claim that echoes his earlier assertion that he refused to sign a waiver before entering a screening, alleging the studio wanted him to “sign away my rights.”
The two camps could not be more divided. Long before seeing the film, Hansen dismissed it as “a very dramatized version” of events and even purchased s for his own true crime network to air before every single screening, effectively putting his own brand in front of the audience. The contrast with critics was stark: IGN scored the film a glowing nine out of 10, calling it “a blast from the past with a sickly allure” that is “as garish as its subject: Chris Hansen’s To Catch a Predator.” For Hansen, the film’s excess is precisely what makes it so hard to take seriously — and so easy to walk away from.
Looking Ahead
With Primetime now firmly in the rearview mirror, Hansen’s attention has shifted to his own slate of projects. He confirmed that he has “a number of documentaries” about his life and career in development, with I am Chris Hansen currently being pitched to multiple platforms. According to Hansen, the documentary predates the film entirely, positioning it as an independent statement rather than a response to Oppenheim’s work. As the documentary market continues to expand across streaming services, the timing of his announcement suggests Hansen is ready to reclaim his own narrative — one that, unlike Primetime, will be told entirely on his own terms.
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