Bruce Willis wears a Panerai Radiomir

In one of the first quiet scenes of Death Wish (2018), Bruce Willis's Paul Kersey holds his watch in both hands and winds the crown, and the camera moves close enough to read the gilt RADIOMIR PANERAI signature under the 12. "I think it's running a little slow," he tells his wife, Lucy. She answers, "Maybe it's time for a new one?", and gives him a second watch as a gift. Then men break into the house while Kersey is on a hospital shift: Lucy is shot and killed, his daughter Jordan is left in a coma, and the watches leave with the robbers.

Kersey is a trauma surgeon in Chicago, and the stolen watch comes back to him at work. A dying gang member named Miguel arrives on his operating table wearing a watch taken from his house, and that recognition is what sets the vigilante plot moving. The watch in the winding close-up is a Radiomir with the cushion case and solid integrated lugs of Panerai's 1940 line, a dark green-grey dial with gilt markers, small seconds at 9 o'clock and a date window at 3. Collectors on Paneristi identify it as the green-dial Radiomir 1940 3 Days, reference PAM00736. The film never confirms a reference, but everything visible in the frame matches that watch.

Haute Time wrote at the time that "Panerai makes its very own cameo" in the film, and added the explanation: the Rolex Yacht-Master and the Panerai Radiomir "are known to be in his personal collection." The Radiomir name goes back to the radium-based luminous paint Panerai supplied on dive instruments for the Italian Royal Navy, and the earliest 47-millimeter cushion prototypes of the 1930s carried wire lugs and hand-wound movements built for Panerai by Rolex. The 1940-style case on Kersey's watch is the later design that traded the wire loops for solid lugs. Eli Roth directed this remake of the 1974 Charles Bronson film, the sixth entry in the series; it opened in March 2018 and took 55.9 million dollars on a 30 million dollar budget. The production's Panerai straps later surfaced on eBay, sold as certified movie props.