Ana de Armas Fans Suing Universal Over Actress Not Appearing In Yesterday
According to The Hollywood Reporter, two Ana de Armas fans are suing Universal Pictures over the actress's absence from the 2019 movie Yesterday. In a class-action lawsuit, Conor Woulfe of Maryland and Peter Michael Rosza of California sued for $5 million. They claim that they rented Yesterday after seeing a trailer for the Beatles-centric movie that included de Armas, indicating that the trailer led them to believe she played a significant role in the film. Upon watching the movie, they discovered that de Armas' scenes were didn't make it into the film's final cut. The rentals cost the plaintiffs $3.99 each at the time of viewing.
"Unable to rely on fame of the actors playing Jack Malik or Ellie to maximize ticket and movie sales and rentals, Defendant consequently used Ms. De Armas's fame, radiance and brilliance to promote the film by including her scenes in the movie trailers advertising Yesterday," the suit reads in part. "Although Defendant included the scenes with Ms. De Armas in the movie trailer advertisements, for the purposes of promoting Yesterday and enticing film sales and rentals, Ms. De Armas is not and was never in the publicly released version of the movie."
For those curious, you can watch the scene featuring the No Time to Die and Knives Out star in the player above.
To perhaps lend a touch of credence to the lawsuit, Yesterday screenwriter Richard Curtis previously confirmed that de Armas' character was previously set to be a major part of the film's plot, making up one part of the film's love triangle.
"That was a very traumatic cut, because she was brilliant in it. I mean really radiant," Curtis revealed to Cinema Blend at the time. "And [that] turned out to be the problem. ... I think the audience likes the story [about Ellie and Jack] and goes with that, and it works out well. What we'd originally done was had, I don't want to describe it too much, but had Ana De Armas as a complicating factor when he arrived in L.A. for the first time. And I think the audience did not like the fact that his eyes even strayed. Because then some people would go, 'Oh, he really doesn't deserve her. He really doesn't deserve Lily.' You know, it's one of those things where it's some of our favorite scenes from the film, but we had to cut them for the sake of the whole.
Film fans may recall other frivolous lawsuits of this nature that have been threatened, and filed, in the past, which failed to gain any traction within the court system. Back in 2011 a suit was brought up in Michigan against the Ryan Gosling movie Drive, alleging that the trailer sold it as an action-thriller and not the drama that it actually was, an appeals court threw out the suit.
Another famous "Trailers lied to me" suit was a UK DC fan that threatened a lawsuit against Warner Bros. over their marketing for 2016's Suicide Squad, alleging they made Jared Leto's Joker a focal point of the trailers only to leave much of his footage on the cutting room floor. That lawsuit was seemingly never filed as no updates have been released in the years since.