Primetime, the A24 drama with Robert Pattinson as Chris Hansen, the To Catch a Predator host, premiered in competition at the Venice Film Festival on Saturday, September 5, and as of September 7, 2026, at my 1:12 AM ET pull, its Rotten Tomatoes page read 95% on 21 reviews, 20 positive against one. Kalshi's board on the final score, ticker KXRT-PRI, repriced every rung in two days. The Above 85 contract went from 48 cents at Friday's last print to 81 cents at Sunday's. Above 90 went from 23 cents at Friday's close to 40 and 41 on Sunday night and 37 in Monday's first hour, and a fresh Above 95 strike printed as high as 64 cents on Sunday afternoon. The market settles on the Tomatometer at 10:00 AM ET on Monday, September 28, three days after the wide release, and between now and then the review pool will grow from a couple of dozen to somewhere in the low hundreds.
That growth is the whole question, and it is not a question about whether critics like the film. Nearly all of them do. It is a question about how much a 21-review number erodes when 150 to 300 more critics file, and the ladder prices that erosion unevenly: cheaply through the 80s, expensively at the very top. A year ago another A24 title, The Smashing Machine, left Venice at 94% on 16 reviews and now sits at 71%. I will come back to that film, because it is the reason the shape of this board matters more than any single price on it. The tape, the ladder, the three Venice comparables, and the exact review counts each strike can afford follow.
These are market prices and model estimates, not predictions of fact and not financial advice. Kalshi is a CFTC-regulated event-contract exchange. Kalshi requires users to be 18+ under its own platform policy, and availability varies by state. Rotten Tomatoes has not endorsed these markets; references to Rotten Tomatoes here are descriptive only.
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The Quick Answer
Kalshi's Primetime market, KXRT-PRI, settles on the film's Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer at 10:00 AM ET on Monday, September 28. At my 1:12 AM ET pull on Monday, September 7, the page read 95% on 21 reviews, 20 positive and one negative. Above 80 was 90 cents bid against 94 ask, Above 85 was 78 against 81, Above 87 was 57 against 65, Above 90 was 38 against 41, Above 92 was 27 against 29, and Above 95 was 11 against 31. Read as a ladder, the market's center of mass is an 86 to a 90, five to nine points below the number on the page, and that gap is the market pricing dilution: what happened to The Smashing Machine, which left the same festival at 94% on 16 reviews a year ago and sits at 71% today. Which rungs the dilution math supports, and which one it does not, is below.
The Record SO Far: Fourteen Reviews, Then Twenty-One
The film is Lance Oppenheim's first fiction feature after the documentaries Some Kind of Heaven and Spermworld, written by Ajon Singh, with Merritt Wever, Skyler Gisondo and Phoebe Bridgers, in her first acting role, alongside Pattinson. The Rotten Tomatoes logline is one sentence: in 2006, To Catch a Predator host Chris Hansen sets out to make television history. Variety reported the film debuted in competition for the Golden Lion; Deadline clocked the ovation at nine minutes, The Hollywood Reporter at nearly eight. Wide release is September 25.
The reviews went up as the premiere let out. CBR, at 2:49 PM ET on Saturday, counted 93% on 14 reviews, which can only be 13 positive against one. ScreenRant, at 3:45 PM ET on Sunday, counted 95% on 20 and called it a record for Pattinson's live-action career, though the number it beat, The Odyssey's 93, is a full-pool score on 507 reviews, which is exactly the comparison this board is pricing. By my pull the count was 20 of 21. Hold onto the shape of that sequence: the one negative review was already in the pool at 14, and every one of the seven reviews that followed was positive. The film has not taken a second negative notice yet.
Rotten Tomatoes' own roundup, published Saturday, has the tone of the pool. Variety's Jessica Kiang called it "a nightmarishly claustrophobic 4:3 portrait of Hansen as a horror villain." IndieWire's Ryan Lattanzio wrote that it has "the style of an arthouse horror movie at its squirmiest." The Playlist's Marshall Shaffer called it "a new high-water mark for Pattinson." The one reservation in the roundup came from The Hollywood Reporter's David Rooney, who found it "never digs that deep, which made me question what this flashy but shallow movie hopes to achieve." The page's average critic rating is 8.0 out of 10, the same figure The Lighthouse carries on 398 reviews. The film is not yet Certified Fresh, a badge that needs a much larger pool, and it plays no part in settlement anyway.
The Tape: Who Paid Up On Saturday Night
Each contract on KXRT-PRI asks whether the Tomatometer will be above its strike at settlement, paying $1 for Yes and nothing for No; our Kalshi odds explainer covers the cents-to-probability conversion and how prediction markets work covers the rest. The board opened on August 6 with ten strikes, and for a month it priced the film as a coin flip at 85. Above 85 traded between 39 and 55 cents from August 8 through Friday, September 4, and closed Friday's tape at 48 after a buyer took 1,672 contracts from 44 up to 48 in the 11:00 PM ET hour, 500 of them at 48 cents at 11:53 PM. Above 90 spent the same month mostly in the 20s and low 30s and closed Friday at 23. At 6:00 PM ET on Friday, Kalshi added three strikes above the original ladder, Above 87, Above 92 and Above 95, and the first Above 95 print was 20 contracts sold at 23 cents at 7:14 PM.
Saturday's noon hour in New York is early evening in Venice, when the review embargo lifted ahead of the premiere, and that is when the board moved. In the 12:00 PM ET hour, Above 85 traded 4,634 contracts, 4,431 of them bought, and went from 53 cents to 56 with a single 1,750-contract print at 65 cents at 12:17 PM, the largest print on the strike until Sunday night. Above 80 traded 1,194 contracts in the same hour, all buyers, from 68 to 77, and printed 84 along the way. The new Above 87 strike printed 92 cents at 12:45 PM on a 42-contract order, a number no one would see again; by 4:00 PM it was trading at 59 to 61. Above 90's noon hour ran 965 contracts from 28 to 31, and then, at 1:08 PM ET, someone sold 3,885 contracts of Above 90 at 31 cents in one print, the largest trade on the entire board over the weekend, and the 1:00 PM hour's 4,251 contracts were 3,985 sellers to 266 buyers. A seller with size decided, an hour after the reviews landed, that a 91 or better on the final count was worth less than 31 cents. Above 95 went the same direction that afternoon: 130 contracts sold at 7 and 8 cents in the 5:00 PM hour.
Sunday was the buyers' day, and the pattern is worth a close read as an illustration of what actually moves a prediction market. Above 85 held 64 to 69 cents overnight, took 1,345 contracts of buying in the 1:00 PM hour with a 1,000-contract print at 69 cents at 1:02 PM, and then in the 5:00 PM hour traded 1,809 contracts from 67 up to 75, with 1,232 of them at 73 cents at 5:58 PM. It printed 78 and 79 in the 6:00 PM hour, 81 at 9:41 PM, and in the 11:00 PM hour 5,045 contracts changed hands at 81 cents, 2,074 of them in one print at 11:19 PM. That hour ran 3,109 bought against 1,936 sold, which is a market finding a two-sided price at 81 rather than a stampede through it. Above 90 ran the same arc a floor lower: 3,055 contracts bought in the 1:00 PM hour from 28 to 40, 4,093 bought in the 8:00 PM hour from 36 to 44, an 856-contract print at 44 cents at 8:44 PM that marked the weekend high on the strike, and a drift back to 37 in the first hour of Monday, an 876-contract hour whose largest print was 616 contracts at 39 cents at 12:21 AM. Above 95's Sunday was two moments: 271 contracts bought in the 12:00 PM hour that ran the price from 21 cents to a 64-cent high, with a 92-contract print at 63 cents at 12:59 PM, and a 35-cent last trade at 7:31 PM.
The tape in one line: Above 85 went from a 48-cent coin flip at Friday's close to 81 cents at Sunday's on two days of buying, while the largest single order on the board, 3,885 contracts, was a seller of Above 90 at 31 cents an hour after the reviews landed.
The 24-hour volume column at the pull says where the argument now lives: 13,311 contracts on Above 90, 10,094 on Above 85, 4,317 on Above 80, 1,789 on the new Above 87. Above 92, the highest strike the number on the page would currently pay, and Above 95, which needs a 96, traded 104 and 342 contracts in the same 24 hours. The board is arguing about 86 through 91. It is barely trading the 95.
The Board: Every Strike On KXRT-PRI
The ladder runs 13 strikes, from Above 45 to Above 95. The bottom five, Above 45 through Above 65, are quoted 97 to 98 cents bid and carry between about 550 and 1,350 contracts of open interest each; Above 70 sits at 96 against 98. The seven rows below are the live ones, pulled from the exchange at 1:12 AM ET on Monday, September 7. "Cost to buy" is the ask, the price a buyer actually pays; the bid is what a seller gets. Kalshi reports volume and open interest in contracts, each worth $1 at settlement.
| Strike | Bid / Cost To Buy | Last Trade | 24h Volume (contracts) | Lifetime Volume (contracts) | Open Interest (contracts) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Above 75 | 94¢ / 98¢ | 93¢ | 1,108 | 5,928 | 4,876 |
| Above 80 | 90¢ / 94¢ | 87¢ | 4,317 | 14,582 | 9,896 |
| Above 85 | 78¢ / 81¢ | 81¢ | 10,094 | 28,068 | 21,558 |
| Above 87 | 57¢ / 65¢ | 65¢ | 1,789 | 2,779 | 2,777 |
| Above 90 | 38¢ / 41¢ | 37¢ | 13,311 | 26,180 | 18,876 |
| Above 92 | 27¢ / 29¢ | 29¢ | 104 | 376 | 346 |
| Above 95 | 11¢ / 31¢ | 35¢ | 342 | 528 | 486 |
Prices as of 1:12 AM ET on Monday, September 7, 2026. Above 87, Above 92 and Above 95 were added on Friday, September 4, which is why their lifetime volume is a fraction of the strikes around them. Above 45 through Above 70, not shown, are all quoted between 96 and 98 cents bid.
The row to read twice is Above 95, and not for its size. It is the only row on the board quoted 20 cents wide: 11 cents bid, 31 cents ask, on a 35-cent last trade. The book behind it explains the gap. On the bid side there are 8 contracts at 11 cents, 6 at 10, 14 at 7, 5 at 5, and then 80 at 4 and 100 at 3. On the offer side, 10 contracts at 31, 21 at 42, 122 at 43, and 109 more at 65. A reader who wanted to sell 100 contracts would clear the 11 and 10 and 7 bids inside the first 28 contracts and finish at 4 cents. A reader who wanted to buy 100 would take 10 at 31 and the rest at 42 and 43. The screen says 11 against 31; the honest quote for anyone dealing in size is closer to 4 against 43. Compare Above 85, where the 81-cent ask carries 10 contracts but 731 more sit at 82 and 2,022 at 84, and Above 90, where 194 contracts are offered at 41, 906 at 42 and 1,144 at 44, with 544 bid at 34 and 400 more at 25. Those two markets carry a couple of thousand contracts within a few cents of the touch on the offer side; the bids are thinner everywhere, and Above 85 shows 16 contracts at 78 before the next bid at 74. Above 95 cannot absorb a hundred contracts on either side. Above 87 is quoted no better at the touch: its 65-cent ask is a single contract, with 1,274 more at 66 and 1,048 at 67 behind it, so the real cost to buy the densest band on the board is 66.
What The Ladder Says The Score Will Be On September 28
Take the midpoint of each row, halfway between bid and ask, and subtract each rung from the one below it, and the ladder turns into the market's probability for each band of final scores.
| Final Score Band | Market probability (midpoints) | Per point of score | What it implies |
|---|---|---|---|
| 80 Or Lower | About 8% | Under 1% | A Smashing Machine outcome, priced as a long shot |
| 81 To 85 | About 12% | 2.5% | Above 80 pays, Above 85 does not |
| 86 To 87 | About 18% | 9% | The densest zone on the board per point |
| 88 To 90 | About 22% | 7% | The band carrying the most probability |
| 91 To 92 | About 12% | 6% | Above 90 pays |
| 93 To 95 | About 7% | 2% | The number on the page today lands here |
| 96 Or Higher | About 21% | Soft | Rests on the 11-to-31 quote of a strike too wide to trust |
Midpoints of the bid and ask at the 1:12 AM ET pull, differenced rung to rung. Bands are unequal widths, which is why the per-point column matters.
The bottom row is the soft one. Strip it out and renormalize the rest and the ladder says roughly three chances in four for a final under 91. Keep it in and the figure is three in five. Either way the market's center of mass sits between 86 and 90.
Put that against the page. The score on the page is 95. The market's center of mass is five to nine points lower, and it assigns somewhere between three chances in five and three in four to a final score under 91, depending on how much weight the untrustworthy top strike gets. In other words, the board is not pricing whether Primetime is good. It is pricing dilution, the gap between what 21 festival critics said and what 200-plus critics will have said by September 28, and it expects about six points of it. Whether six is the right number is what the comparables are for.
The Dilution Problem: Three Venice Debuts, Three Endings
Here is the film I promised to come back to. The Smashing Machine, A24's Benny Safdie drama with Dwayne Johnson, premiered at Venice on Labor Day weekend 2025 and, per ScreenRant's write-up at 2:29 PM ET on September 1, 2025, "debuted with a 94% score on Rotten Tomatoes" on 16 reviews. Its page now reads 71% on 308 reviews, 219 positive against 89. Work backward from those two counts and the 292 reviews that arrived after the debut ran about 70% positive. A 94 on 16 became a 71 on 308, and a Kalshi ladder priced off the festival number would have paid nothing above the 70 strike.
That is the cautionary case, and there are two more from the same festival that ended differently. Yorgos Lanthimos' Bugonia debuted at Venice at 100% on 17 reviews, per ScreenRant, and its page now reads 87% on 342, so the 325 reviews after the debut ran about 86%. Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein went the other way: CBR had it at 79% on 19 out of Venice, its page now reads 85% on 381, and the later 362 reviews ran about 85%. The table puts the three next to Primetime's number and next to Pattinson's own record.
| Film | Debut score (reviews) | Score now (reviews) | Positive rate of the reviews after the debut |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Smashing Machine (Venice 2025) | 94% (16) | 71% (308) | About 70% |
| Bugonia (Venice 2025) | 100% (17) | 87% (342) | About 86% |
| Frankenstein (Venice 2025) | 79% (19) | 85% (381) | About 85% |
| Primetime (Venice 2026) | 93% (14) on the day, 95% (21) at the September 7 pull | Settles September 28 | The question on the board |
Debut counts from the linked write-ups on the day each film premiered; current counts from each film's Rotten Tomatoes page at the September 7 pull. Post-debut rates are the difference between the two counts, rounded.
Two things stand out. First, in all three cases the later reviews ran between 70% and 86% positive, and none of them ran at the debut rate. A festival pool is the critics who flew to Venice, filed on deadline and, in most years, skew toward the film's intended audience; the wide-release pool is everyone else. Second, the direction of the move followed the debut, not the film's quality: the two films that opened in the 90s and above both fell, and the one that opened at 79 rose. Regression toward the pool's true rate cuts both ways, and Primetime is starting from the high side of it.
Pattinson's own filmography is the other reference. His best-scored live-action films finished at 93% (The Odyssey, 474 of 507), 91% (Good Time, 215 of 237) and 90% (The Lighthouse, 357 of 398). The Odyssey, at 93.5% positive across 507 reviews, is the ceiling of what a Pattinson film has done over a full pool, and it is a ceiling that resolves Above 92 as Yes and Above 95 as No.
The Arithmetic Of The Next 179 Reviews
The ladder is anchored to a raw score of 95.24, which is 20 of 21. The Coyote vs. Acme settlement on August 31 taught two things that carry straight over: Rotten Tomatoes rounds the half-point up, a raw 95.50 printed as 96, and Kalshi's "above" is strict under its settlement rules, so a print of exactly 95 settles Above 95 as No. Right now the page shows a 95, which means the Above 95 contract that traded at 64 cents on Sunday is a No on today's number. It needs two straight positive reviews to print a 96 (22 of 23 is 95.65), and it loses that again on the next negative.
The cushions at the top of the board are thin because the pool is small. From 20 of 21, one more negative review prints a 91: Above 92 breaks, Above 90 holds by one point. Two straight negatives print an 87: Above 90 and Above 87 both break. Three print an 83 and take Above 85 with them. Four print an 80, and Above 80 is gone. Six of the seven strikes on the table are within four consecutive bad reviews of resolving No today; only Above 75 survives that run, and it takes six straight negatives to reach a 74. That is why the interesting question is not the next review but the next two hundred. The Onslaught pool, a wide release with no festival run, grew from 20 reviews to 98 in the week around its opening, and the score went from 80 to 53 doing it, per our settlement page. A prestige A24 title with a three-week runway between the festival and September 25 should land in the low-to-mid hundreds by the morning of the 28th; The Smashing Machine had 308 within a year, and Bugonia 342. The table below works the ladder at 200 and 300 reviews.
| Strike | Score it needs September 28 | Negatives it can absorb in the next 179 reviews (pool of 200) | Positive rate that requires | Positive rate over the next 279 (pool of 300) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Above 80 | 81 or higher | 38 | 79% | 80% |
| Above 85 | 86 or higher | 28 | 84% | 85% |
| Above 87 | 88 or higher | 24 | 87% | 87% |
| Above 90 | 91 or higher | 18 | 90% | 90% |
| Above 92 | 93 or higher | 14 | 92% | 93% |
| Above 95 | 96 or higher | 8 | 95.5% | 95.7% |
Arithmetic from 20 positive of 21 reviews, the split on the Rotten Tomatoes page at the September 7 pull, with Rotten Tomatoes rounding to the nearest whole number and Kalshi settling strictly above each strike.
Now lay the comparables over the table. Bugonia's post-debut rate, 86%, lands Primetime on an 87: Above 85 pays, Above 87 does not. Frankenstein's, 85%, lands it on an 86, the same result one point lower. The Smashing Machine's 70% lands it on a 73, which pays Above 70 and nothing from Above 75 up. The Odyssey's full-pool 93.5%, the best any Pattinson film has done, lands it on a 94, which pays Above 92 and misses Above 95 by two points. Against that range, Above 85, offered at 81 cents, is a contract that pays on two of the three Venice comparables and on any Pattinson-grade finish, and loses on the Smashing Machine case. Above 90, offered at 41 cents, needs the next 179 reviews to run at 90%, a rate none of the three comparables managed after their debut and only The Odyssey managed over a full pool. And Above 95, offered at 31 cents, needs the next 179 to run at 96%, with no more than eight negative reviews among them, which is a rate no Pattinson film has ever held over a full pool; the best post-debut rate in the comparable set, Bugonia's 86%, is ten points short of it.
The Read
Settlement is one snapshot: the Tomatometer displayed at 10:00 AM ET on Monday, September 28, strictly above the strike, with the Fresh and Certified Fresh badges playing no part (full mechanics in the Kalshi Rotten Tomatoes markets explainer). Readers newer to event contracts can start with what the price means, and every payout figure here is before Kalshi's fees.
The ladder as a whole is reasonable. A center of mass at 86 to 90 is where the Bugonia and Frankenstein paths land, and the seller who put 3,885 contracts of Above 90 into the bid at 31 cents an hour after the reviews landed was pricing exactly that dilution. The 81-cent Above 85 price, which spent a month as a coin flip and two days climbing, is the market catching up to a pool that has taken one negative review in 21 and has Pattinson's three best live-action finishes on its side. Where the board is off, in my read, is the top rung. Above 95 needs a 96 on the final count, a number Pattinson has never reached and none of the three Venice comparables held past their first week, and it was offered at 31 cents with a 35-cent last trade, against an 11-cent bid that is itself only eight contracts deep. The 20-cent gap is the market admitting it does not know what a 96 is worth, and nothing in the comparables gives the ask any support.
The one I keep coming back to is the sequence in the review count itself: one negative at 14, none in the seven since. A pool that runs 20 of 21 is either a film critics agree on to a degree the Smashing Machine's 15 of 16 turned out not to be, or it is the same festival sample effect one year later with a better lead performance in it. There is one scheduled event between now and the settle that can move the pool: Primetime is in competition for the Golden Lion, and the award is decided before the film opens wide. A win puts the film in front of every critic who skipped the festival with a prize attached; a shutout takes nothing off the page but the buzz. The next 179 reviews decide which reading is right, and the market has already told you where it thinks the answer sits: three chances in five on a number under 91, three in four if you discount the strike nobody trades, and almost no money at all on the 95 that is sitting on the page. By Any Means and Onslaught settle on the same rules at 10:00 AM ET on Monday, September 7, and the rest of the boards we grade in public, across politics, sports and entertainment, are on the prediction markets hub.
- Runner Rotten Tomatoes Score: A Dozen Reviews In, The Next One Picks A Side
- By Any Means Rotten Tomatoes: Traders Beat The Write-Ups To The Drop
- Onslaught Rotten Tomatoes Score: Will It Hold On Kalshi?
- Coyote Vs. Acme Rotten Tomatoes: 96 Held. The Margin Was Zero
- Kalshi Rotten Tomatoes Markets: How Contracts Settle
