Actor Jared Leto spotted wearing a Casio

When costume designers dress a Marvel character, every prop carries intent. In the 2022 Sony film Morbius, Jared Leto's brilliant but doomed biochemist Dr. Michael Morbius wears not a Swiss tourbillon but a Casio F-91W — a choice that says more about the character than pages of dialogue.

The Casio F-91W launched in 1989 and has not left the catalogue since. It runs a Casio module 593, a quartz movement accurate to roughly plus or minus 30 seconds per month, housed in a resin case measuring 38.2mm across and weighing a featherlight 21 grams. The backlit LCD displays time, date, and stopwatch functions. Water resistance is rated to 30 meters — adequate for hand-washing, not much else. The CR2016 battery lasts approximately seven years. By any technical measure, it is the minimum viable wristwatch.

Yet the F-91W occupies an outsized cultural footprint. It became notorious in the early 2000s when U.S. military intelligence flagged it as a timing device of choice for improvised explosive devices, lending the watch an accidental, uncomfortable mythology. Simultaneously, it became a fixture of minimalist and anti-consumerist subcultures, a statement against watch fetishism made, ironically, by wearing a watch. Barack Obama was photographed wearing one during his pre-presidential years. The model's production longevity — over three decades without a fundamental redesign — makes it one of the purest expressions of functional industrial design in horology.

For Leto, the F-91W fits a pattern. The actor is known off-screen for eclectic personal style and has been spotted wearing considerably more expensive timepieces in civilian life. As Morbius, however, the watch signals a character defined by obsession with science over status — a man too consumed by curing his rare blood disease to care about luxury signaling.

On the secondary market, the F-91W trades for essentially its retail price of under fifteen dollars, occasionally fetching marginally more in deadstock or vintage condition. It is, categorically, the most democratic watch in serious circulation. That may be precisely why it works so effectively as a costume detail — and why collectors who pride themselves on knowing better quietly own at least one.