Ansel Elgort wears a Rolex Counterfeit (prop)

An hour into James Cox's Billionaire Boys Club (2018), Sydney Evans catches the Rolex on Joe Hunt's wrist doing something no Rolex should. "It's ticking," she tells him. "The second hand on a Rolex sweeps." Hunt, who a moment earlier called it "the nicest gift anyone's ever given me," answers with the only conclusion left: "It's a fake." The gift came from Ron Levin, the Beverly Hills high roller played by Kevin Spacey, the investor and con man Hunt's circle will eventually murder.

The film follows the real Billionaire Boys Club case: wealthy young men in 1980s Los Angeles who follow Hunt, Ansel Elgort's preppie commodity trader, into a Ponzi scheme that turns deadly. Minutes after the watch reveal, the film puts the whole value system in one line of dialogue: "You can do anything in Beverly Hills with a Rolex and a Rolls."

What model of Rolex the prop plays is never said. The one specific claim in circulation, a crowdsourced match to a Submariner Date reference 16610, points at a watch Rolex introduced years after the film's early-1980s setting, so it cannot be the period piece it would need to be. And the watch Hunt verifiably wears in production photography is something else entirely: a small silver digital with an LCD window that the spotting sites cannot agree on either, called a Casio by one and a vintage Seiko by another. The Rolex is the watch the film talks about; the digital is the one on his wrist in the still.