Tom Hardy wears a Bremont U-2

Early in Venom (2018), in a San Francisco restaurant booth, Eddie Brock laughs with his fiancee Anne Weying, one arm thrown up behind his head, and on that raised wrist is a blacked-out pilot's watch on a dark leather strap. Eddie, played by Tom Hardy, is an investigative journalist who confronts Carlton Drake, the Life Foundation CEO, about the company's human trials, and the stunt costs Eddie and Anne both their jobs. When he later breaks into Drake's research facility he finds his friend Maria held as a test subject, and the symbiote possessing her transfers to his body, leaving her dead and Eddie sharing his skin with an alien. The watch is a Bremont U-2/51-JET, and the identification needs no sleuthing because Bremont's own Venom page states that the stealthy timepiece "can be seen throughout adorning the wrist of Eddie Brock played by friend of the brand, Tom Hardy."

The name packs three aircraft into one watch. Bremont, founded in Henley-on-Thames in 2002 by the brothers Nick and Giles English, designed its U-2 collection for the spy plane squadron at Beale Air Force Base in California and named it after their Lockheed U-2, the ultra-high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft. The 51 is the brand's faux-vintage lume, first used on its Mustang P-51 watch. And JET points both at the color scheme and at the Hawk T1 jets of the RAF's 100 Squadron, whose members commissioned the military work this design draws from. The 100 Squadron was the first squadron formed for night bombing, back in 1917, and the U-2/51-JET arrived around the squadron's centenary, black from every angle: 43mm of DLC-coated steel in Bremont's three-part Trip-Tick construction, black dial, black leather strap, an exhibition caseback in smoked glass. The heat-blued steel hands and that aged-tone lume are nearly the only relief. A second crown at 4 o'clock drives the Roto-Click inner bezel, Bremont's patented substitute for a dive bezel, and the movement is a date-only automatic, chronometer-tested by COSC, though Bremont left the chronometer branding off the dial.

Bremont treated the film as a launch. In celebration of Hardy's role, the brand released the same U-2/51-JET to the public at 3,995 pounds, and Time+Tide noted that the placement ties in with Hardy's personal relationship with the founders. Venom itself, directed by Ruben Fleischer and written by Jeff Pinkner, Scott Rosenberg and Kelly Marcel, took 856 million dollars worldwide. In the restaurant scene, the happiest Eddie gets before everything goes wrong, the watch is right there on his raised wrist, case catching the light.