Pierre Niney wears a Breguet Pocket Watch

Edmond Dantès is arrested on his wedding day, accused of Bonapartism, and disappears into the Château d'If for fourteen years. Matthieu Delaporte and Alexandre de La Patellière wrote and directed the 2024 French adaptation together, with Pierre Niney as Dantès, Pierfrancesco Favino as the Abbé Faria who becomes his teacher in prison, and Laurent Lafitte as Gérard de Villefort, the deputy prosecutor in the conspiracy against him. When Faria dies in a tunnel collapse, Dantès escapes the island sewn into his friend's burial sack, finds the treasure, and returns as the Count of Monte Cristo. The film premiered at Cannes in May 2024 to an ovation that ran nearly eleven minutes, sold nine million tickets in France, took around one hundred million dollars worldwide, and runs 178 minutes.

The Count carries a Breguet pocket watch, and the production handled the brand with unusual care: the watch itself was recreated for filming, an authentic Breguet marine chronometer sits in Morrel's office scenes, and Dumas had referenced Breguet by name in the original novel. Thierry Delettre, the costume designer who also dressed The Three Musketeers: d'Artagnan, kept the wardrobe mostly true to the period.

Breguet was the right name for a Restoration-era pocket. Abraham-Louis Breguet set up in Paris in 1775, on the quai de l'Horloge, and his client book ran from Marie-Antoinette and Napoleon Bonaparte to Alexander I of Russia; he patented the tourbillon in 1801, and in 1810 he designed, with his friend John Arnold, a piece for Caroline Bonaparte, Queen of Naples, that anticipated the wristwatch by a century. His most famous commission began in 1783, a watch for Marie Antoinette ordered by one of her guards; it took almost twenty years to finish, cost 30,000 francs, and was completed only around 1802, long after the queen was gone.