A US judge has dismissed a lawsuit from fans of Ana de Armas after she was cut from the film Yesterday despite appearing in the trailer.
The Knives Out actor appeared in the trailer for the 2019 film from director Danny Boyle, which follows struggling musician Jack Malik (Himesh Patel) who wakes up in an alternate reality where he’s the only person who remembers the Beatles.
- READ MORE: ‘Yesterday’ movie: Richard Curtis, Danny Boyle, and Himesh Patel on teasing Ed Sheeran and imagining a world without The Beatles
Conor Woulfe and Peter Michael Rosza said they each paid $3.99 (£3.16) to rent the film on Amazon Prime Video, only to discover that de Armas was not in the film. They filed a lawsuit for at least $5million (£3.9million) against Universal Pictures last year, over claims of false advertising, unjust enrichment and violation of unfair competition.
The lawsuit claimed Universal were “false, misleading, and deceptive” by showing de Armas in the trailer for the film.
In a later amendment, Woulfe claimed he had rented Yesterday a second time in 2023 on Google Play, which listed de Armas as a cast member. He said he believed the actor could have appeared in that version if it was a director’s cut.
On August 28 (via The Hollywood Reporter), district judge Stephen Wilson, however, tossed out the case, agreeing with Universal that it was a “self-inflicted injury”.
Wilson said it was “not plausible” that Woulfe could claim the film had been misrepresented to him, because the plaintiff’s case had “expressly stated that de Armas ‘is not and was never in the publicly released’ version of Yesterday”.
He added (via the Guardian): “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.”
Universal’s lawyers previously refuted the lawsuit, claiming a trailer is an “artistic, expressive work” which conveys the general theme of the movie.
Screenwriter Richard Curtis previously explained de Armas, who played another love interest for Patel, 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 CinemaBlend in 2019.