Ryan Reynolds wears an Omega Speedmaster

On March 11, 2022, Netflix released The Adam Project, Shawn Levy's second film with Ryan Reynolds after Free Guy, and within twenty-eight days it had been watched 157.6 million times. Reynolds plays Adam Reed, a fighter pilot who steals a time jet in 2050, aims for 2018, and crash-lands in 2022 instead, where he finds his twelve-year-old self, played by Walker Scobell in his first film. Their father, Mark Ruffalo's quantum physicist Louis Reed, invented the time travel that makes the whole chase possible, and he died in a car accident before the story begins. Both Adams are still carrying that loss, and both are carrying the same object: their father's Omega Speedmaster.

The watch was never in the script. Reynolds pitched the idea to Levy, who loved it, and the production then had what prop master Dean Eilertson described to Hodinkee as 'a mad panic to find Omega Speedmasters' until Omega stepped in and delivered four, one of them a stunt watch with a frozen mechanism. Thirteen and a half minutes into the film, the two Adams settle the question of who they are to each other by comparing chin scars and then holding up their identical watches. Hodinkee's Danny Milton identified the watch as the previous-generation Moonwatch with the hand-wound caliber 1861: no step dial, the flat A in the Speedmaster script, and a piece of period logic on top, since an heirloom handed down before 2022 could not have been the new 3861 model that replaced it. In the bar scene where adult Adam nurses a whiskey under a Michelob sign, the black chronograph sits on a dark fabric strap, and the tachymeter bezel catches the neon.

The straps are where the prop department buried its work. 'Ryan's had a NATO strap because he was a pilot,' Eilertson said. 'Young Adam's leather strap was in one condition and his father's was in another condition to show the passage of time.'