Channing Tatum wears a Bulgari Aluminium

In The Lost City, which Aaron and Adam Nee directed and which earned 192.9 million dollars against a 68 million dollar budget in the spring of 2022, Sandra Bullock plays Loretta Sage, a former archaeology researcher who turned her expertise into romance-adventure novels starring a hero named Dash McMahon. Channing Tatum plays Alan, the cover model who poses as Dash, and when Daniel Radcliffe's billionaire Abigail Fairfax kidnaps Loretta to help him find a treasure on a remote island, Alan mounts the rescue himself. Brad Pitt turns up as Jack Trainer, a former Navy SEAL turned CIA operative who handles the extraction with terrifying competence until he is shot early in the job, and the film keeps him alive just long enough for the credits scene. The production shot it in the Dominican Republic across the summer of 2021.

The watch on Alan's wrist through all of this is a Bulgari Aluminium, and its history rhymes with its wearer. Bulgari introduced the Aluminium in 1998 and pitched it as the first luxury watch made of aluminum, topped with a rubber bezel, the black ring carrying the BVLGARI BVLGARI signature the house had been engraving on bezels since the Diagono of 1988. The original generation ran on quartz movements; when Bulgari relaunched the design in 2020, it came back as a 40-millimeter mechanical automatic with 100 meters of water resistance, and Time and Tide Watches called it a refined take on the Bulgari Bulgari of the late '90s and reported it as the brand's top-selling watch of 2020.

You can see the design working in the film's stills. By campfire light in the jungle, the watch reads as a dark instrument on a dark strap; in daylight, with Tatum's arms crossed in a cream henley, the black rubber bezel sits in a pale aluminium case and the whole thing looks closer to sportswear than to jewelry. A watch engineered so a luxury house could pass as sport, worn by a man whose job is being photographed as someone braver than he is, makes a tidy piece of casting. That is a reading, not a documented decision; nobody from the production has said why Alan wears it.