Mark Ruffalo wears an Omega Speedmaster

The Speedmaster in The Adam Project (2022) starts on Mark Ruffalo's wrist. He plays Louis Reed, the quantum physicist who invents time travel and dies before the story opens, and the watch his son inherits becomes the film's connective tissue: Walker Scobell's twelve-year-old Adam wears it in 2022, Ryan Reynolds's adult Adam wears it in 2050, and when the two of them jump back to 2018 to find their father before his death, the original is still on the wrist of the man himself. Hodinkee, covering the film in its Watching Movies column, called Reed "the godfather of time travel." Jennifer Garner plays Ellie, his wife.

None of it was scripted. Prop master Dean Eilertson told Hodinkee that Ryan Reynolds pitched the Speedmaster to director Shawn Levy, and that once Levy agreed, "it became a mad panic to find Omega Speedmasters." Omega supplied four, one of them a stunt watch with a frozen mechanism, and the straps did the timeline work: "Young Adam's leather strap was in one condition and his father's was in another condition to show the passage of time," Eilertson said. Hodinkee read the watch as the previous-generation Speedmaster with the caliber 1861, the right call for an heirloom in a film set mostly in 2022, since a dead father's watch ought to be older than the current catalog.