Adeel Akhtar wears a Richard Mille RM52-01 Skull Tourbillon

Murder Mystery 2, Jeremy Garelick's Netflix sequel from a James Vanderbilt script, builds its kidnapping around a returning character: the Maharajah, played by Adeel Akhtar, who survived the first film in 2019 and has since become the Spitzes' billionaire friend. He is abducted at his own island wedding, the ransom trail runs to Paris, and the film landed in Netflix's top ten in more than ninety countries.

On the Maharajah's wrist, the French site Montres de Luxe identified a Richard Mille RM52-01 Skull Tourbillon, and in the same breath asked the only question that matters when a Richard Mille turns up on screen: whether it is a genuine RM or a simple replica, which happens, the site noted, given what these watches cost. The real thing is a 43 by 50 millimeter case of TZP nano-ceramic over a carbon nanotube case middle, holding a skull sculpted in 5N red gold whose jaws grip a ruby inside the tourbillon cage, with the manual RM052 caliber behind it and a sapphire caseback; Richard Mille made thirty of them after the model's 2013 debut. Collector databases add a wrinkle of their own: the character may wear two different RMs across the film, one grey on a black strap, one gold and possibly set with diamonds.

So the record stops a step short of certainty. The model is identified, the authenticity is a question the identifying source itself raised, and no still in the file shows the watch at all. The film, meanwhile, logged 173.6 million viewing hours by June 2023: a very large stage for a watch that exists, in its genuine form, as an edition of thirty.