Robert Pattinson is about to test whether lightning strikes twice for A24 in the same calendar year. Primetime, his crime thriller directed by Lance Oppenheim, opens September 25, and the studio will be watching the worldwide number closely because Pattinson already gave them a hit earlier this year with The Drama.

That film, a romantic comedy also starring Zendaya, closed its run at $132.5 million worldwide, per Box Office Mojo, good enough to become A24's fourth-biggest release ever. It got there by overtaking Civil War and Materialists. So the bar for Primetime is simple to state and hard to clear: anything past $133 million and it becomes Pattinson's bigger A24 hit of 2026, and it walks straight into the studio's all-time top five.

A different kind of Pattinson film

Where The Drama was light, Primetime is not. Oppenheim, making his narrative feature debut here, has built the film around a 2007 Esquire piece called "Tonight on Dateline This Man Will Die." The plot loosely tracks the making of the reality series To Catch a Predator, with Pattinson playing a fictionalised version of the show's host, the Chris Hansen figure everyone of a certain age remembers from cable television.

It's a swing. And critics seem to be buying it. The film sits at 93% on the Tomatometer, level with Marty Supreme, which puts it among the better-reviewed titles of the year without a single ticket sold yet.

What the early numbers say

Early estimates have Primetime opening domestically somewhere between $10 million and $15 million, which lines up almost exactly with where The Drama started. That film opened to $14.4 million in North America and then built from there on word of mouth rather than a big first weekend. If Primetime follows the same curve, the $133 million target stops looking like a stretch and starts looking like a formality.

But curves don't repeat themselves just because a studio wants them to. Crime thrillers built around a true story and a discomforting premise don't always hold audiences the way a rom-com with two movie stars does. A24 will know this by the end of opening weekend.

What's clear already is the bet A24 is making on Pattinson as a two-films-a-year draw, something the studio hasn't really tried with anyone else at this scale. If Primetime clears the bar, 2026 becomes the year Pattinson delivered A24 its two biggest global hits back to back. If it doesn't, The Drama stays the outlier and the studio has a conversation to have about how much of that number was really Zendaya.

Either way, the answer starts arriving September 25, when the first Friday numbers come in from North America.