Arnold Schwarzenegger wears a Panerai Luminor

The Panerai Luminor Marina in Eraser (1996) was a gift from Sylvester Stallone. Stallone had been wearing the then-obscure Italian brand since the mid-1990s and gave one to Arnold Schwarzenegger, the rival he had spent a decade competing with for action-movie supremacy. Chuck Russell directed Eraser as a conspiracy thriller in which Schwarzenegger's John Kruger, a U.S. Marshal who fakes witnesses' deaths to protect them, shields a defense-contractor whistleblower while rooting out corruption inside his own agency, complete with electromagnetic railguns and a parachute-free jump from a plane.

The watch is a Pre-Vendome Luminor Marina, reference 5218-203/A, with small seconds at nine o'clock and "Marina" on the dial, the features that separate it from the plainer Base model. Pre-Vendome means it was built after Panerai's 1993 revival but before the Vendome group bought the brand in 1997, a period when Panerai had no boutiques, no advertising, and almost no civilian customers beyond a small circle of Italian collectors. Schwarzenegger wearing one in a hundred-million-dollar action film, alongside Stallone's own on-screen Panerai that same year, gave the brand a Hollywood entry it could never have bought.