Christopher Rhoten
2026 might be the year of Anne Hathaway. While Mother Mary stumbled at the box office, The Devil Wears Prada 2 was a smash hit, and next month’s The Odyssey will see Hathaway return to theaters in one of the year’s biggest blockbusters. David Robert Mitchell’s The End of Oak Street is set to release in August, and Hatheway will close out the year with Verity in October, co-starring with Dakota Johnson.
She might, however, have to share the title. Look closer, and there’s a certain Odyssey co-star set to frequent the big screen himself. The Drama might be all Robert Pattinson has to show for 2026 thus far, but he has four more films releasing before the end of the year, including the third Dune. Pattinson will also play Antinous in Nolan’s epic and star alongside Denzel Washington in Here Comes the Flood later in the year. The 40-year-old recently started filming next year’s long-awaited sequel to The Batman, as well.
If there’s anything in common between the two (besides The Odyssey), it’s the eclectic nature of these roles. From pop stars to Greek mythology to “shape-shifting Face Dancers,” 2026 promises plenty of range from two of Hollywood’s biggest stars. Hathaway and Pattinson may have built their names on studio-driven fare and teen movies, but an appetite for switching things up promises a career year for both.
Still, sometimes you’ve got to play to your strengths. Wednesday saw the first trailer drop for Pattinson’s third film of 2026: Lance Oppenheim’s Primetime. The A24 offering will focus on controversial TV host Chris Hansen and his infamous Dateline NBC program, To Catch A Predator, which followed Hansen setting up sting operations as he attempted to (and often succeeded with) catching sexual predators in the act. Pattinson stars as Hansen, with Merrit Wever, Skyler Gisondo, Anna Faris, and musician Phoebe Bridgers rounding out the cast. Interestingly, Ari Aster is listed as a producer—practically guaranteeing this won’t be your run-of-the-mill biopic.
You can watch the full trailer below, and yes, I stole the title from a YouTube comment. Often, with these first-look teasers, there’s not much to say about the tease itself. But Primetime packs a lot of footage into its minute-long trailer, courtesy of grainy monitors stacked atop one another, resembling a control room.
“What would have happened if I wasn’t here?” Pattinson asks in a voiceover as he walks down a staircase, confronting an unsuspecting perp. “You see how this looks, right?” The atmospheric trailer flashes clips from both the show and Hansen’s personal life, promising to leave no stone unturned as it documents his meteoric success on primetime television. Leaning hard into an early-2000s aesthetic that reflects the era when the series ran, the trailer almost resembles a neo-noir in the vein of Nightcrawler (fitting, given the subject matter) or Pattinson’s own Good Time. Perhaps the Michael Mann blue and frequent downpours suggest Oppenheim will turn Hansen’s story into a sordid crime thriller in its own right.
A discerning viewer could rewatch the thing ten times and notice something new. What everyone will notice right away is Robert Pattinson’s uncanny Hansen impression. I actually didn’t realize I was listening to Pattinson until I saw his mouth moving at the end—that’s how perfectly he’s captured Hansen’s nasally voice and slightly smarmy, matter-of-fact cadence. The actor was previously unrecognizable as the voice of the Heron in the American dub of 2023’s The Boy and the Heron, so maybe it all points to a career in voice acting once the leading roles in Hollywood have dried up.
That’s a long way off, if ever. Even if the voice is a big change, Primetime sees Robert Pattinson once again embodying driven, obsessive characters with his increasingly recognizable charm. Though Hansen’s career has rolled on in the past couple of decades through various spiritual successors, the original To Catch a Predator famously ended in controversy and death. The question is how closely Oppenheim, a documentary filmmaker making his feature-film directorial debut, sticks to the facts.
Primetime hits theaters later this year.
