Ben Affleck wears a Seiko Wired

Michael Jennings does the impossible for a living. In John Woo's Paycheck, Ben Affleck plays a reverse engineer who takes contracts so secret that his memory of the work is erased the moment each job ends. He signs on for a three-year project, the longest of his career, and when it is finally over he walks in to collect expecting a fortune. What he finds instead is a manila envelope. Inside are nineteen ordinary objects he mailed to himself before the wipe, among them a ring, a box of matches, a crossword puzzle, a can of hairspray, a bus pass, and a watch. He has, it turns out, signed the money away. The trinkets are all that is left, and the rest of the film is Jennings working out why the version of himself he can no longer remember decided each one was worth more than the cash.

The watch is a Seiko Wired, reference W522-4A30, a digital LCD model on a brushed steel bracelet. Wired is Seiko's youth-oriented sub-brand, and the W522-4A30 was a Japanese-market piece from around the turn of the 2000s rather than anything rare or expensive. That suits the premise. Every object in the envelope has to look like junk and then prove essential, so the props lean deliberately unremarkable, and a plain digital watch fits that better than anything costly would.

The film gave the watch a second life. Collectors began hunting the W522-4A30 as the Paycheck watch, and Seiko brought the model to the American market after the release. More than twenty years later it still surfaces on the secondhand market, sold as exactly that, the watch from Paycheck.