Sylvester Stallone wears a Panerai Submersible

In a close-up in The Expendables 2, Barney Ross adjusts his fingerless glove and three pieces of his kit share the frame: a bronze watch with a green dial on his left wrist, a gold skull ring on his finger, a skull buckle on his belt. Simon West's sequel sends Barney's team after a downed plane in the former Soviet Union; the cargo turns out to be a map to a hidden Russian plutonium mine, Jean-Claude Van Damme's Vilain kills one of their own taking it, and the rest of the film is the hunt. The production shot in Sofia, Bulgaria, in the fall of 2011.

The watch was Stallone's own: a Panerai Luminor Submersible 1950 3 Days Automatic Bronzo, reference PAM00382, the first Panerai sports watch made entirely of bronze, a thousand pieces from 2011, 47mm around the green dial, an alloy of 92 percent copper and 8 percent tin that darkens into its own patina, a titanium back, 11,600 dollars at list. Stallone had been wearing Panerai since at least December 1994, when he was photographed in one a year before he filmed Daylight, the movie the old marketing lore wrongly credits with introducing him to the brand. For Expendables 2 he bought Bronzos for the whole crew: Statham, Lundgren, Crews, Couture, and himself. Nobody in the cast paid.

There were two of Barney's watch on the production, and both ended up at auction. Stallone's real Bronzo, catalogued as owned and screen-worn in The Expendables 2, sold at Sotheby's in June 2024 for 96,000 dollars against an estimate of 30,000 to 60,000, the lot packed with a spare skull-studded strap, two posters he signed, an original still of him wearing the watch, and a handwritten note. The production's stand-in went to Propstore: a look-alike built in gold-colored stainless steel with green luminous markers, Panerai logos applied to the back and straps, and screws still loose from production wear.