According to Variety, director Lance Oppenheim says Robert Pattinson only agreed to star in A24's "Primetime" after the director shipped 200 canisters of Zyn nicotine pouches to his Los Angeles home alongside the script, addressed "Dear Chris Han-Zyn." The film, which casts Pattinson as the "To Catch a Predator" host, has earned nearly $50 million worldwide against a $15 million budget since opening Sept. 25.
The best scene in "Primetime" is the one that never made the cut. A mailroom in Los Angeles. A script draft. Two hundred cans of nicotine pouches during a national shortage. Oppenheim didn't pitch his movie. He ran a supply chain.
The PR machine worked in reverse here, and it worked perfectly. Oppenheim told Vulture that Pattinson was "grappling with a Zyn addiction" at the time, which turned a package delivery into what he now calls a "brilliant bribe." Indie prestige sells on authenticity, and nothing sells authenticity harder than an anecdote about a bribe. The movie is about a man who lured prey into a trap. The marketing is about a star who got lured into a movie. The symmetry was planned.
Oppenheim then compared the "yes" phone call to "LeBron making the announcement that he was joining the Heat," which is the exact sentence every Hollywood publicist is copy-pasting tonight. The next A24 acquisition comes with a sports metaphor and a hand-delivered prop, and we will all call it cinema. Even the real Chris Hansen, who gave the performance a "D" on a podcast, is just free traffic at this point.
YOUR TURN: Is the Zyn bribe the most 2026 thing about this movie, or is it that the real Chris Hansen had to grade the performance on a podcast to get a word in?
Comments (1)