Summary
- A lawsuit against Universal over a misleading trailer for the film Yesterday has been dismissed by a judge who deemed it a "self-inflicted injury".
- Plaintiffs claimed that Ana De Armas' appearance in the trailer deceived them when she was cut from the final film, but the court ruled that further amendments to their complaint would be futile.
- This case raises questions about audience rights to fair marketing, but the judge ultimately decided that the deception was not severe enough to hold up in court.
A lawsuit surrounding a misleading trailer from the film Yesterday has been officially dismissed by a judge. Yesterday is a 2019 film about a struggling musician Jack (Himesh Patel) who wakes up one day and discovers that he’s in an alternate reality where The Beatles never existed, and he is the only person who re their songs. Befuddled by what to do, Jack makes a sticky decision by singing the famous quartet’s songs himself, presenting them as his own to elevate his music career.
Four years after the film’s release, a Yesterday lawsuit surrounding a misleading trailer where Ana De Armas appears, but had her scenes cut in the final product has been dismissed. According to Deadline, U.S. District Judge Stephen Wilson took issue with plaintiffs Paul Michael Rosza and Conor Wolfe’s “misrepresentation” claim against Universal. Wilson went on to side with Universal’s defense that this was a “self-inflicted injury,” ultimately scrapping the case entirely. Check out Wilson’s statement below:
In each prior dismissal, the Court has clearly delineated the pitfalls of the complaint and allowed successive amendments. However, it now appears to the Court that further amendments would be a futility. Accordingly, dismissal is without leave to amend. This is the third time that Plaintiff has amended their complaint, and it shall be the last.
The Ana De Armas Yesterday Trailer Lawsuit Explained
This strange Yesterday lawsuit first arose in 2021. Inspired by a trailer, which features a brief moment of De Armas catching lead character Jack’s adoring eye, Rosza and Woulfe rented the film on Amazon Prime Video. Displeased to find that De Armas was not in the final cut of Yesterday, Rosza and Woulfe decided to file a $5 million lawsuit against Universal, claiming the studio’s marketing to be “false, misleading, and deceptive.”
Rosza and Woulfe did not give up. As Wilson references in his statement, Rosa and Woulfe amended their claims even after the court dismissed them multiple times. In one such 2022 amendment, Woulfe even tried to claim “misrepresentations on Google” after renting the film a subsequent time on Google Play. Of this amendment, the judge claimed that “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.”
It looks like Rosza and Woulfe’s lawsuit will finally be put to rest with this newest dismissal. As outlandish as the nature of this lawsuit may be, the Yesterday lawsuit raises interesting questions about what right audiences have to fair marketing. De Armas can be considered a bigger star, or was when the claim was filed in 2021, than many other actors in the film. Thus, to have De Armas teased in a later-cut role can be deceiving to a prospective Yesterday viewer, though much to Rosza and Woulfe’s dismay, not deceptive enough to hold up in court.
Source: Deadline
