We’re in the thick of summer now, and with it comes days at the beach, ice cream trucks, and perhaps even a trip to the movies for the summer blockbuster, which this year is Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day. The film opened to $44 million domestically and has climbed to $195 million after three weeks in theaters. Hamilton has used the occasion to continue its nearly century-long tradition of working with filmmakers, outfitting two of the film’s central characters with watches of their own. Disclosure Day follows a race between those trying to reveal a long-hidden truth and the forces working to keep it buried. In the film, Josh O’Connor’s Dr. Daniel Kellner wears a Khaki Field Mechanical, while Noah Scanlon, another central character, is played by Colin Firth and wears a Jazzmaster Open Heart.
Hamilton Khaki Field Mechanical 38mm.
Why We’re Watching
Disclosure Day marks the first time Hamilton has placed a watch in a film directed by Spielberg—he produced, but didn’t direct, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, which means this is new ground for a relationship that’s typically run through Christopher Nolan. Notably, there likely isn’t a watch to be found in Nolan’s highly anticipated The Odyssey.
Josh O’Connor in Disclosure Day. Photo courtesy of Hamilton.
That history with Nolan is worth dwelling on, because it’s arguably the high point of Hamilton’s film work. Interstellar gave us “The Murph,” the Hamilton Pilot’s Watch worn by Matthew McConaughey’s Cooper across decades and timelines—it later became a retail hit for the brand in its own right, complete with a launch event in New York. Tenet followed with a digital prop piece built as well. Most recently, Cillian Murphy wore three vintage Hamiltons pulled from the brand’s own archive as Oppenheimer. Did it help him win the Oscar? Well, it certainly didn’t hurt his campaign.
Hamilton Jazzmaster Open Heart 40mm.
But Hamilton’s film work goes back further and wider than Nolan’s library of work. Will Smith wore a Hamilton Ventura in another summer blockbuster back in 1999—Men in Black. Harrison Ford wore a vintage-inspired piece in Dial of Destiny. Linda Hamilton wore a digital Nixon in Terminator: Dark Fate, and Bradley Cooper wore a gold Hamilton in Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley. The brand has also gone deep with prop masters like Ritchie Kremer, who’s spoken about what it takes to get a watch right on screen, down to how many units of a single reference a production needs on hand (Nolan, we hear, required ten Murphs for Interstellar).
Besides supplying the watches to be worn on screen by some of Hollywood’s top actors, Hamilton also supports all the folks who work behind the scenes. Since 2006, Hamilton has also run its own awards show, the Behind the Camera Awards. It’s an award show honoring below-the-line artisans, presented by A-list actors—a fitting extension of a brand whose relationship with Hollywood runs deeper than what ends up on screen.
This brings us back to Disclosure Day, where tradition holds. The Khaki Field Mechanical’s hand-wound simplicity suits a character whose conviction is meant to read as plainspoken and direct. The Jazzmaster’s open-heart construction, on the other hand, makes for an interesting use case, making the movement visible and giving off the air of working in plain sight, and as the press release puts it, suiting a character whose understanding of the story’s hidden systems is the whole point of his arc.
Disclosure Day is in theatres now. For more on Hamilton, click here.
