Judge throws out lawsuit by Ana de Armas fans over ‘Yesterday’ trailer
A US judge has dismissed a lawsuit from fans of the actor Ana de Armas after the actor was cut from Danny Boyle’s 2019 movie Yesterday, despite appearing in the trailer.
The Cuban actor featured in the movie trailer for the 2019 rom-com, which follows the story of Himesh Patel’s struggling musician, Jack Malik, who randomly finds out he is the only one who remembers The Beatles’ music and becomes famous by playing their songs. With a story written by Richard Curtis and Jack Barth, the film also stars Lily James, Joel Fry, Ed Sheeran, and Kate McKinnon.
Richard Curtis explained to CinemaBlend in 2019 that de Armas – who played a love interest for Malik – was cut after the movie was shown to test audiences. “I think the audience did not like the fact that his eyes even strayed,” he told the publication in 2019.
In the lawsuit regarding de Armas’ role in Yesterday, Conor Woulfe and Peter Michael Rosza claim they paid $3.99 (£3.16) each to rent the film on Amazon Prime Video, only to discover that the actor is not included. Accordingly, in January 2022, the pair filed a lawsuit for $5million (£3.9million) against Universal Pictures, claiming false advertising, unjust enrichment and violation of unfair competition. It claimed that by showing de Armas in the trailer, Universal was “false, misleading, and deceptive”.
Now, though, District Judge Stephen Wilson, who previously ruled that Woulfe and Rosza’s suit could proceed, has thrown out the case.
As reported in The Guardian, Wilson claims that the suit was a “self-inflicted injury” after Woulfe revealed in the amendment that he rented the movie for the second time in 2023 on Google Play. Additionally, the plaintiff said he did so to claim new “misrepresentations on Google”, as De Armas was listed as a cast member in Yesterday when searching on Google.
As he had already watched Yesterday on Prime, it was “not plausible” that Woulfe could claim that it had been misrepresented to him, Wilson ruled, saying that the case had “expressly stated that De Armas ‘is not and was never in the publicly released version’ of Yesterday”.
“Plaintiff Woulfe has offered no explanation as to why he believed that version of Yesterday they accessed on Google Play would be a different version of the movie they accessed on Amazon,” Wilson added.
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