Arnold Schwarzenegger wears an Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Offshore

About sixteen minutes into Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, the T-850 breaks into a pickup truck and checks above the sun visor for the keys, a trick audiences would remember from the previous film. He finds a watch instead. For a few seconds the film cuts to Terminator vision, a red readout running SCAN MODE, INTERNAL CLOCK, YEARLY ANALYSIS over a close-up of an Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Offshore T3, octagonal bezel and crown guards filling the frame while the machine updates its internal chronometer against it. Then he hot-wires the truck anyway.

The watch was built for the film. Audemars Piguet developed the Royal Oak Offshore T3 in close cooperation with Schwarzenegger, a longtime AP fan, and released it in the summer of 2003 alongside the movie: a thousand pieces in titanium, split between charcoal gray dials on black straps and silvered dials on brown, the case 57.2 millimeters across and nearly 16 thick, listed around 19,900 dollars in a presentation box holding DVDs of the first two Terminator films and a certificate for the third. The press materials suggested it could be worn over a jacket sleeve, and collectors argue it opened the era of limited-edition Offshores that followed.

No published account puts the T3 on a wrist anywhere in the film. The claim that Schwarzenegger wears it in Terminator 3 has circulated since the launch publicity, but the visor scan is the watch's documented appearance, and the enthusiasts who introduced it in April 2003 could only imagine it on the character's arm.