Sylvester Stallone wears a Panerai Luminor

The Expendables opened on August 13, 2010, a few weeks after Stallone turned 64. He directed it and co-wrote the screenplay with David Callaham, assembling Statham, Lundgren, Jet Li, Couture, and Crews around himself, with Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger in cameos, for a story about mercenaries hired to overthrow the dictatorship of an island called Vilena. It took the number one spot with a 34.8 million dollar opening weekend and finished at 274.5 million dollars worldwide against a budget of roughly 80 million.

The watch on Barney Ross's wrist is the Panerai Luminor 1950 Regatta Rattrapante, reference PAM00332: a 44mm steel case and bezel under a hard black coating, a split-seconds chronograph with a tachymeter scale running the automatic OP XVIII calibre, named for the yacht-race timing the rattrapante function exists to do, built in 2009 as a special edition of 500 pieces. Stallone's example is number 96 of the 500, with the serial BB 1337061 engraved on the back. In the aiming close-up the blacked-out case is on his left wrist behind the pistol.

Stallone had been wearing Panerai since the mid-1990s, and not because a film set introduced him to it, the way the legend goes; a photographer brokered the introduction and the watches arrived as gifts, and his visibility did more than any campaign to move the brand from obscure military supplier to action-movie staple. His Regatta Rattrapante has since been sold twice. It went through Julien's auction of property from his life and career in December 2021, then returned to the block at Propstore in March 2024 as a screen-worn lot, estimated at 25,000 to 50,000 dollars, in its padded Panerai box, the strap showing minor wear from use.