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Chris Hansen, the television journalist turned YouTube creator who hosted To Catch a Predator more than twenty years ago, has some feelings about the new film Primetime with Robert Pattinson, in theaters September 25. But are Hansen’s emotions strong enough to consider legal action? Or buy ad space to promote his streaming network? Yes, and yes. Why don’t you take a seat? We’ll explain the whole thing.

One of the buzziest movies of the year is Primetime, a new A24 film starring Robert Pattinson as Chris Hansen amid the success of To Catch a Predator on Dateline NBC. In case you weren’t around in the 2000s, the controversial segment famously catfished men soliciting sex from minors (who were really adult actors in disguise) over the Internet. After Chris Hansen showed up to tell them their day wasn’t going to go as planned, the men were arrested by local police, though many ultimately did not go to jail.

Between its sordid premise, its modernized themes of capital built on bloodlust, a phantasmagoric vibe, and Robert Pattinson going beast mode, Primetime is shaping up to be a legitimate must-see event. Importantly, it isn’t a biopic about Chris Hansen. It’s officially based on an article this very magazine published in 2007, entitled “Tonight on Dateline This Man Will Die,” which documented the show’s production and the suicide of Texas district attorney Bill Conradt, whose death was captured on camera.

Hansen’s first official response to the movie came out in May, in an interview with Jesse Weber of NewsNation at CrimeCon in Las Vegas. (Yes, there’s a CrimeCon.) During the interview, Hansen said that he had been aware of the film and he had been contacted, though he was asked “not to talk about it a great deal at this point.”

After a long summer, Hansen began talking about the movie in August, when he appeared on Annie Elise’s Serialousy podcast and confirmed he hadn’t been involved in its production. He only learned of its existence once it wrapped. “We had heard, you know, obviously, with all the different properties I have and all the platforms, some of the people who are involved in the management also tangentially have relationships in the Hollywood world. So we had heard that this was in the works a couple months ago,” Hansen said. “They came out and said, ‘Hey, look, we’re doing this. We’d like you to have some sort of, you know, consideration in terms of helping us with this.’”

At the time, Hansen was scheduled to see an early screening of the movie with A24. But that didn’t happen. Two days later, on August 20, Chris Hansen appeared on Fox News where he told Jesse Watters that he left A24’s offices earlier that day after the studio’s lawyers asked him 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.” Hansen’s own lawyers called the document “very restrictive.”

At least, that’s Hansen’s point of view. In a report by TheWrap, a source claimed that Hansen was asked to sign a typical non-disclosure agreement, and nothing that would have relinquished Hansen’s rights to his name and brand.

Hansen clarified in his interview on Fox News that he has “no financial stake” in Primetime.

Here’s where things get a little weirder. During the week of August 26, Hansen began appearing in outlets like Entertainment Tonight and The Dan Abrams Show on SiriusXM. He announced he purchased ad spots for Primetime screenings to promote TruBlu, his true crime streaming network, and filmed a new thirty-second spot that encourages moviegoers to check out his current endeavors. In a statement to Entertainment Weekly, TruBlu’s president, Shawn Rech, said it was an “opportunity.”

You can watch Hansen’s TruBlu ad below.

Meanwhile, Hansen has publicly considered legal action. On Dan Abrams, Hansen said he knows someone who, in his words, was “entrenched in entertainment law” and told him he has options. At the same time, Hansen weighed how much he wants to give the movie fodder that could inadvertently promote it. “I just think that there are a number of issues here,” he said on Dan Abrams. “One is ethical. If you’re going to use somebody’s name and the name of their colleagues and the name, potentially, of family members who have nothing to do with this and you’re doing it because you have this dark Hollywood vision of your creativity and you’re going to take a real story and flesh it out and make it fiction, why, then, do you have to use my real name?”

As for Pattinson’s performance, Hansen thinks it’s actually quite good. He said on Entertainment Tonight: “Obviously he has practiced imitating me, and while I think it’s overly dramatic, I think there is a pretty good imitation there in the trailer.”

While Chris Hansen’s response to Primetime has varied and frankly comes across as a guy trying to figure out what to do about it in real time, this is easily the most people have thought about him and his show since the ratings heyday of To Catch a Predator. How does that old nugget go? All press is good press? We’ll find out how true that is once Primetime opens in theaters in late September.