Ioan Gruffudd wears an unidentified watch

Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer puts Ioan Gruffudd back in the blue suit as Reed Richards, the physicist the rest of the team relies on and the public knows as Mr. Fantastic. Tim Story directed the 2007 sequel, in which a chrome figure on a surfboard circles the planet as the herald of Galactus and Reed is the one asked to work out how to stop it. The studio's marketing art lines the four up in uniform with the Surfer behind them, and every wrist in it is bare or covered. There is no watch to read.

What Reed wears off duty is the open question. No watch magazine, prop auction, or studio placement names a timepiece on him, and a neutral search of the film-watch sources comes back empty for both of Gruffudd's turns as Richards, the 2005 original and this 2007 sequel. A third film was planned and never made, so those two are the whole of his run in the role.

The franchise did get a watch eventually, just not for him. In 2025, for the reboot The Fantastic Four: First Steps, Citizen built a limited Marvel Zenshin in Super Titanium, the four heroes set around a deep blue dial and an enlarged 4 at the four-o'clock that glows in the dark. Eleven hundred pieces, by Citizen's count. Gruffudd wore the suit first, in two films that took more than three hundred million dollars apiece, and got no watch of his own.