WARNING: There are major spoilers ahead for Primetime, especially the movie's ending.
Primetime, from director Lance Oppenheim, the latest movie from A24 to hit the 2026 movie schedule, asks a lot of questions and leaves it up to the audience to decide the answers. One question that the ending of the movie asks is who the villain of the story is, which is based on the real events of the short-lived Dateline NBC spinoff To Catch a Predator.
The movie provides the stark answer to where the motivations lead, and that is with the suicide of one of To Catch a Predator's targets, a Dallas-area district attorney named Bill Conradt, who turns a gun on himself at the end of the movie, just as he did in real life with the Predator crew and the cops outside his house. That death left the show and its creators reeling, and it spelled the end of Predator on NBC.
Primetime doesn't hit audiences over the head with an answer to the question of who the villain of the film is, deftly leaving it open to interpretation. Here's what co-star Merritt Wever told us about it.
Is There One Villain? Is Everyone A Villain?
Audiences will likely have different opinions on who the villains are in the movie, aside from the predators, which no one will dispute. Is TV the villain? Is the ratings system for TV shows the villain? Is host Chris Hansen (Robert Pattinson)? Is the show's producer?
Wever, who plays Predator’s producer Andie Bender in the movie, has thoughts on the matter. When we asked her who she thinks the villain is in Primetime, she gave us her thoughts:
Well, yeah, there's more than one. And I don't know if I would even use the word villain. I mean, maybe the word monster comes to mind. All of these people chasing this outside evil, these outside predators, these outside monsters, they all tend to either reveal the monster in themself, reveal the predator in themself. Have to come to terms with the parts of themselves that are masochistic or ugly or harmful.
It sounds like she believes Hansen and the crew of Predator take some of the blame. It’s not just one person in particular, however. In the movie, none of the people involved in the show come across as heroes, for sure. Certainly, her character does not in her quest for a ratings hit (along with Hansen). The organization, Perverted-Justice, who run the sting operation, especially its leader, Xavier Von Erck (Matthew Maher), looks bad, as does host Chris Hansen himself on a number of levels. However, Wever is forgiving of some of the characters’ motivations, telling us:
But one thing I appreciated about this project is that it's not so cut and dry. And I think the article that it was based on, too, has a lot of compassion for everyone involved. And one of the first things Lance said to me when we spoke was, ‘This is not a hit piece against anyone involved.’
While the movie certainly doesn’t go easy on Hansen or anyone else involved, every character’s motivation in the story is genuine. Hansen wants to be seen as a great journalist and (at least at first) is driven by getting the story of child predators out into the world. Von Erck wants to lock them all up. Wever’s Bender wants to make a great show. Somewhere along the line, the movie argues, the original ideals of all of them get lost.
Primetime is sure to spark a lot of conversations about its role in that mid-2000s era of reality television and how successful its tactics were. One thing is for sure: it’s very good at asking the right questions.
