Sylvester Stallone wears a Fossil Big Tic

No actor did more to make Panerai famous than Sylvester Stallone. He wore the heavy Italian dive watches through Daylight, through the Expendables films, on red carpets and in magazine spreads, until the cushion case looked like part of his uniform. Which is why the watch on his wrist in Driven is worth a second look. It is not a Panerai.

Driven, released in 2001, was Stallone's bid to do for open-wheel racing what Rocky had done for boxing. He wrote the screenplay and played Joe Tanto, a veteran driver pulled out of retirement to steady a hot-headed rookie, with Renny Harlin directing the crashes. In the pit-lane scenes Tanto stands in his racing suit, covered in Mercedes and Nextel logos, and the watch on his wrist is a round steel piece with a dark dial. It is a Fossil Big Tic. Fossil launched the Big Tic in 1999 as an ana-digi hybrid: analog hands on a forty-millimeter dial, with a digital band of seconds scrolling across a small window. It was one of the signature youth-market watches of the Y2K years.

That identification rests on more than a freeze-frame. In 2023 the prop house Premiere Props catalogued the watch for auction, describing it as Joe Tanto's stunt-double Fossil Big Tic from Driven, framed in a shadowbox. The lot went unsold, but the listing ties the watch to the production.