Dwayne Johnson wears a Breitling

When Dwayne Johnson walked the red carpet for Red Notice in November 2021, the watch sites knew exactly what was on his wrist: an IWC Portugieser Annual Calendar, reference IW503502, a blue-dialed piece that runs around twenty-one thousand dollars. Johnson collects watches the way some people collect cars, and his red-carpet picks get photographed and named by watch publications.

The watch his character wears in the film is a different story. Johnson plays John Hartley, an FBI profiler who gets framed by Ryan Reynolds's art thief and has to chase a set of Cleopatra's jeweled eggs to clear his name. In one scene, raising a pistol in a brown leather jacket, he has a steel dive watch on his left wrist: a black dial, a toothed rotating bezel, a steel bracelet. Concave Brand Tracking, the firm that logs every visible logo in a film and adds up its advertising value, caught it too, and could say only that "The Rock also wears a Breitling watch in the first part of the movie."

That is the whole identification. No model, no reference, just a brand in a placement report, on a watch shot too fast on screen to read a dial. Concave counted around forty million dollars of brand placement in Red Notice, from Mercedes to Aviation Gin to Johnson's own Teremana tequila, and the watch on the lead's wrist is the one product it could not fully name.