According to Hansen, the problem emerged when he was asked to sign an agreement before being allowed inside.
“I’ve never seen anything quite like it. The lawyers at A24 wanted me to sign away my rights to my name, image and brand essentially, as well as any potential legal rights that would come out of the movie. I couldn’t sign that, so they didn’t show me the film. I went all the way over there,” Hansen told Jesse Watters.
His account suggests the document contained provisions he considered substantially broader than the usual demand that a preview audience keep an unreleased movie confidential.
Hansen ultimately refused to sign. He said that decision meant he was not allowed to see the film.
A source says Hansen was given a standard preview agreement
A source cited by Deadline challenged the suggestion that Hansen had been asked to surrender rights to his identity in exchange for access to the screening.
According to that account, the document was a standard NDA distributed to people attending advance screenings, in this case approximately a week before the movie was due to be shown to the invited audience.
The source said its purpose was to prevent spoilers and protect the film's intellectual property before release, rather than require Hansen to relinquish ownership of his name, image or brand.
Under that version of events, the sequence was considerably less dramatic: Hansen declined to sign the required confidentiality agreement and therefore could not attend the screening.
The dispute cannot be resolved from the competing descriptions alone because the agreement itself has not been provided in the material available here. What is clear is that Hansen and the source characterize both its scope and significance in sharply different terms.
Primetime puts Pattinson inside Hansen's most famous television era
The argument is particularly awkward because Primetime is built around the part of Hansen's career that made him one of the most recognizable television journalists of the 2000s.
Directed by Lance Oppenheim from a screenplay by Ajon Singh, the film stars Pattinson as Hansen and is set in 2006, during his work on a Dateline NBC investigation that would become part of To Catch a Predator.
The NBC hidden-camera series investigated adult men attempting to arrange sexual encounters online with people they believed to be minors. Hansen became closely associated with the programme through his confrontations with the men who arrived at locations used in the investigations.
Primetime is due to reach cinemas on September 25.
Hansen had previously confirmed that the movie's team had invited him to see the film privately, making his account of being refused entry after arriving all the more pointed.
Hansen was already uneasy about Hollywood telling his story
The screening dispute also comes against a backdrop of Hansen expressing reservations about how his career would be translated into a Hollywood film.
Speaking on Tuesday's episode of the Serialously podcast, Hansen said Pattinson was not the actor he had once imagined playing him.
“I didn’t get to choose my own guy. I always thought — I had discussions years ago, I had crafted a script — Denis Leary [would] play me, depending on the age of it all,” he said.
Hansen acknowledged that Pattinson is “a very popular actor,” but said he still had concerns about the casting of the former Twilight star.
Those comments suggest his unease with Primetime predates Thursday's NDA disagreement. Hansen is not merely an invited guest watching somebody else's film; he is the real-life figure whose career and public image provide the material.
The dispute now hangs over a film Hansen still has not seen
For now, there are two competing accounts of what happened at the advance screening.
Hansen says he was presented with an unusually restrictive document that could have affected rights relating to his identity and any legal claims arising from the film. The source cited by Deadline says it was an ordinary spoiler-protection agreement and that Hansen was denied entry only because he would not sign it.
The distinction is substantial, particularly for a movie depicting a living public figure who has already expressed concerns about how his story is being handled.
Unless the agreement itself becomes public or either side provides further documentation, the precise terms remain unclear. What Hansen can say with certainty is that, despite travelling to a screening of a movie in which Robert Pattinson plays him, he still has not actually seen it.
Everyone else gets their chance on September 25 — presumably without having to negotiate the rights to being Chris Hansen first.
