Sylvester Stallone wears a Panerai Submersible

There is a frame in The Expendables 3 (2014) where Barney Ross raises a radio to his mouth, the skull ring on his hand filling half the shot, and the watch on his other wrist comes up with it, close enough to read like a catalog page: brushed titanium cushion case, black ceramic dive bezel with round markers, black dial, black rubber strap. It is the Panerai Luminor Submersible PAM 389, the watch Stallone picked as standard issue for his cast in this film, a 47mm antimagnetic titanium diver rated to 300 meters and running Panerai's P.9000 movement with a three day reserve. The crew wore theirs. Stallone, the man often credited with the brand's rise in America, made sure one was on his own wrist too.

The film around the watch is the franchise's changing-of-the-guard story. Patrick Hughes directed this one, and the plot has Ross disband his veterans and hire a recruiter named Bonaparte to staff a younger, cheaper team. The kids get captured by Stonebanks, the disgraced Expendables co-founder the team believed dead, and the old crew comes back to pull them out.

The Panerai is only half of Stallone's wrist record here. He also wears his own Richard Mille RM 032, a 50mm titanium flyback chronograph with a list price around one hundred forty thousand dollars, and both of Barney's watches eventually went to auction: the real Richard Mille from Stallone's personal collection, sold with a handwritten note and its original box, visible in the trailer as he flies a plane beside Antonio Banderas, and a replica Richard Mille prop the production ran on a red rubber band for the action sequences. The Submersible got the close-up.