Christian Bale wears a Seiko 5

Rolex said no. Patrick Bateman, the status-obsessed investment banker and serial killer of Bret Easton Ellis's 1991 novel, wears a Rolex on the page, but Rolex would not put its name on the wrist of a man who kills people with an axe. So the film's costume designer, Isis Mussenden, found the closest look-alike she could: a Seiko 5, reference SNXJ90, with a fluted gold-tone bezel, a white day-date dial, and a two-tone Jubilee-style bracelet. From a few feet away it reads as a two-tone Datejust. Up close it is a roughly hundred-dollar Japanese automatic built to resemble a far more expensive watch.

Mary Harron directed American Psycho and wrote the screenplay with Guinevere Turner, turning Ellis's novel into a dark comedy about 1980s Wall Street vanity. Bale plays Bateman as a man consumed by surfaces: the right business card, the right restaurant reservation, the right suit. Jared Leto, Willem Dafoe, Reese Witherspoon, and Chloe Sevigny fill out the cast. The disguise on his wrist held up for a long time. It was only when the film reached high-definition home video, two decades after release, that viewers could read the dial and see the watch had never been a Rolex at all.