Full Trailer for A24's Primetime Arrives as Venice Looms
Robert Pattinson, inhabiting NBC anchor Chris Hansen with a coiled, almost predatory stillness, stands at the centre of A24's latest provocation — a film that examines how the network's infamous To Catch a Predator was conceived, produced, and spun from a Dateline segment into a cultural phenomenon in the mid-2000s. Directed by Lance Oppenheim, the film is set to premiere at Venice, and judging by the trailer alone, it arrives with the kind of thematic discomfort that defines the studio's most polarising work.
The Visual Grammar of Exploitation
What the trailer reveals, shot by shot, is Oppenheim's apparent interest in the machinery behind the spectacle. We experience Pattinson's Hansen not as a crusader but as a television professional navigating the line between journalism and entertainment — a line the trailer seems eager to blur. One scene, glimpsed only briefly, suggests a moment of celebration among the production team, raising the question the film will almost certainly pose: at what point does the pursuit of justice become its own form of exploitation? The ensemble around Pattinson — Merritt Wever, Skyler Gisondo, and musician Phoebe Bridgers — hints at multiple vantage points within that machinery, each presumably offering a different lens on the ethical vertigo the show provoked even among its own creators.
The presence of Jeff Zucker, NBC's then-news division chief, looms in the trailer's edges. A reported exchange — "I don't like your show" — crystallises the institutional tension that Oppenheim appears to be excavating: the friction between a network executive's instincts and a programme that became, for better and worse, appointment television.
Why This Film Matters Now
What makes Primetime culturally legible in 2026 is not nostalgia for mid-2000s reality television, but a deeper reckoning with how we consume other people's worst moments as content. That era produced Intervention, Celebrity Rehab, Hoarders — shows where viewers were invited to gawk at human wreckage and call it empathy. To Catch a Predator occupied a particularly thorny space within that tradition, because the targets were undeniably monstrous, which made the voyeurism feel righteous. Oppenheim's film, if the trailer is any guide, is less interested in condemning Hansen than in dissecting the conditions that allowed the show to thrive — and the audience that demanded it.
This is Pattinson's second A24 collaboration of 2026, following The Drama, and the studio's willingness to place him in morally ambiguous territory again suggests a creative partnership built on mutual appetite for discomfort. Whether Primetime earns the kind of critical and awards recognition Venice can bestow will depend on how far Oppenheim is willing to push past the sensational premise into genuine interrogation. The trailer, at least, promises a film that refuses to let anyone — producer, anchor, viewer — off the hook cleanly.