Chris Hemsworth wears a Hamilton Ventura

When the Men in Black came back in 2019, almost nothing came back with them. Will Smith had left, Tommy Lee Jones had left, and Barry Sonnenfeld, who directed the first three films, had left. One thing stayed: the watch. Chris Hemsworth, playing London's top agent under the codename H, wears a Hamilton Ventura, the same asymmetric watch the agency has worn since the 1997 original. Hamilton's own description puts the Ventura on the level of the black suit, the wrap-around shades, and the neuralyzer.

The Ventura was an odd watch to make a franchise's emblem. Hamilton launched it in 1957 as the world's first electric watch, battery-powered after more than a decade of research, with a shield-shaped case the designer Richard Arbib gave the same atomic-age lines as a tail fin or a kidney-shaped coffee table. It was a movie watch long before the Men in Black existed: Elvis wore one in Blue Hawaii. For the reboot Hamilton built two. Tessa Thompson's Agent M gets the classic, steel with a black dial on quartz, and Hemsworth's H gets the larger automatic, its dial cut open over the self-winding H-10 movement and its 80-hour reserve, on a brown leather strap.

The week the film opened, Hamilton put that automatic Ventura, reference H24515551, on sale, so anyone could leave the theater and buy the watch on Hemsworth's wrist. By then the partnership was twenty-two years old, the same watch handed from Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones to Hemsworth and Thompson across four films.