A US district judge has thrown out a $5m lawsuit from two movie fans who accused Universal Studios of tricking people into watching Yesterday by featuring actor Ana de Armas – who had been cut from the final movie – in the film’s trailer.
In a class action suit filed last year, Peter Michael Rosza of San Diego and Conor Woulfe of Maryland said they paid $3.99 each to watch the Danny Boyle romantic comedy on Amazon Prime, only to discover that De Armas was not in the film.
Accordingly, “such consumers were not provided with any value for their rental or purchase”, the suit read, with the two men suing for $5m over false advertisement, unjust enrichment and violation of unfair competition.
District judge Stephen Wilson previously ruled that Woulfe and Rosza’s suit could proceed, saying trailers were commercial speech and subject to laws around honest advertising.
But in an order dated 28 August, Wilson tossed the suit out, agreeing with Universal that the case was a “self-inflicted injury” after Woulfe revealed in an amendment he had rented Yesterday a second time in 2023, this time on Google Play. The plaintiff explained he did so to claim new “misrepresentations on Google”, as De Armas was listed as a cast member in Yesterday in Google searches.
As he had already watched Yesterday on Prime, it was “not plausible” that Woulfe could claim the film had been misrepresented to him, the judge ruled, adding that the plaintiff’s own 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 noted in the order.
If successful, the case could have had groundbreaking implications for studios, and how trailers are cut together. The plaintiffs had argued that they could be deceived again by the trailer in the future if a director’s cut of Yesterday sans De Armas was released, but Wilson dismissed this argument as “too speculative”.
Directed by Boyle and written by Richard Curtis, Yesterday follows a musician, played by Himesh Patel, as he is thrust into an alternative reality where the Beatles never existed.
De Armas, who has appeared in hits including Knives Out, Blonde and James Bond flick No Time to Die, was originally cast in Yesterday as a love interest for Patel, but she was cut after the film was shown to test audiences. “I think the audience did not like the fact that his eyes even strayed,” Curtis told Cinamablend in 2019, of the romance between Patel and De Armas’ characters.
Universal has yet to respond to a request for comment.
