Dwayne Johnson wears a Panerai Submersible

Early in Hobbs and Shaw, the 2019 film that gave the Fast and Furious franchise its first spin-off, Luke Hobbs stands in a glass-walled CIA office in London trying to interrogate Hattie Shaw, who has just injected a deadly virus into her own bloodstream. The interview collapses into a fight. Hattie takes down the agent guarding the room and comes up holding a gun, and Hobbs, played by Dwayne Johnson as a former DSS agent on assignment for the CIA, wraps her up rather than striking her. In the middle of that scuffle his left wrist gets a clean moment on camera, and on it sits a Panerai Luminor Submersible.

The Submersible is the dive watch in Panerai's lineup, the familiar cushion case and crown guard with a rotating bezel added, and the one on Johnson is 44 millimeters of stainless steel. By most standards that is a big watch. By Panerai's it sits at the compact end of the range, and on Johnson it manages to look smaller still, which is what the watch press dwelt on when it picked the Submersible out of the trailers before the film had even opened. In closer shots the watch rides a brown leather strap, the dark dial carrying the row of oversized luminous markers Panerai puts on its divers.

Jason Statham's Deckard Shaw wears a vintage 40 millimeter Rolex Submariner in the same film, which leaves the two leads split between a small vintage Rolex and a big modern Panerai. The likeliest explanation is also the simplest: Johnson and Statham both collect watches, both have a record of wearing their own pieces in their movies, and Johnson's brand has long been Panerai. What nobody has established is the exact reference on Hobbs's wrist. The case, the bezel and the dial settle the model line, and there the identification stops.