Dwayne Johnson wears a MTM Black 3-GER

Midway through Skyscraper (2018), Will Sawyer fights a man hand to hand inside a burning Hong Kong tower with his palms wrapped in duct tape, and on his left wrist, riding a black metal bracelet, is the watch he wears through the whole ordeal. Dwayne Johnson's Sawyer is a Marine veteran who led an FBI Hostage Rescue Team until a rescue gone wrong took his left leg below the knee, and he has since remade himself as a private security consultant, hired to assess The Pearl, a 3,500-foot, 225-story tower that is the tallest building in the world. Then a terrorist crew starts a fire on the 96th floor with a water-reactive chemical, the police decide Sawyer is the man behind it, and his wife Sarah and their twins Henry and Georgia are trapped above the fire line. He has to clear his name and get them out, at one point sending Sarah and Henry through the flames in a free-falling elevator.

The watch is an MTM Black 3-GER, and the identification came not from the studio but from a watch magazine. Time+Tide's Dan Senia "confirmed the spot as the MTM Black 3-GER" after what the publication described as "a few team emails, WhatsApp messages, and sleepless nights in the Time+Tide office." MTM liked the verdict enough to republish the article on its own media page, which makes the placement brand-acknowledged. The 3-GER itself was the first automatic in MTM's line-up: a COSC-certified Valjoux 7750 chronograph in a DLC-coated titanium case, on a bracelet whose links connect with ball bearings instead of the usual pins, at ten thousand dollars retail.

MTM stands for Multi-Time Machine, and the company is not a typical movie-wardrobe brand. Headquartered in Los Angeles, it spent 25 years making watches for the US military and law enforcement agencies, from SWAT teams to the FBI and the Secret Service, which puts a watch built for real federal agents on a fictional one. Skyscraper was not even Johnson's first MTM on screen: the brand's own placement list also has him in its Cobra for Rampage and a Black Cobra in G.I. Joe. Rawson Marshall Thurber directed the film, which opened on July 13, 2018 and took 304 million dollars against a 125 million dollar budget.