Have a seat: Chris Hansen wants to show you something.
On Friday, Hansen’s TruBlu streaming network ($4.99/month or $49.99/year) unveiled the trailer for I’m Chris Hansen, a documentary about and starring the Dateline legend three years in the making. That timeline is important as everyone involved wants you to know that this doc is not simply some knee-jerk reaction to how Hansen feels about A24 feature film Primetime, in which Robert Pattinson portrays the To Catch a Predator journalist.
As for Primetime, well, he’s not a fan. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter — Hansen’s first since the Lance Oppenheim film debuted at Venice — Hansen called the movie, out today in theaters, “a complete work of fiction attached to a real name.”
“Based upon what I’ve seen in the trailer and my understanding of what has been written about the film, they wanted to create something much darker and way more dramatic,” he told THR‘s Seth Abramovitch. “I think it’s an insult to the thousands of men and women who work hard every day to protect children from predators. They turn something that is very positive, very challenging and not without risk into what is essentially a horror film.”
And that, Hansen added, is itself “exploitative and predatory.”
At the time, Hansen had not seen the film because he refused to sign a nondisclosure agreement — but he set up a major troll-job anyway, buying ads for TruBlu ahead of all Primetime screenings, as first reported by THR.
Hansen wants you to know he has no beef with Pattinson personally.
“I have no issue with Robert Pattinson. I think he’s a great actor and a nice guy, and he has been very gracious in his comments about me,” he said. “But they put him in a difficult position. He’s going to be asked, ‘Did you actually meet with Chris Hansen?’ And he has to explain why, as an actor portraying me, they never reached out even to have a discussion.”
Hansen’s theory?
“I think it’s because the studio and the director didn’t want to know the truth,” he said. “They had a notion of the film they wanted to create, and they wanted to benefit from the use of my name.”
Hansen’s true crime streaming channel is now benefiting from the film’s release. Read more from THR‘s interview with Hansen here, and watch his doc’s trailer below:
