Judge agrees with Ana de Armas fans suing Universal for removing her from ‘Yesterday’

Did it end up lying in trailers? What exactly is lying? Lhe story we bring you today looks like something out of a movie and involves a judge, two Ana de Armas fans and a controversial trailer that could have very interesting repercussions for the future of any film promotion. This all started in the summer of 2019, when ‘Yesterday’, a romantic comedy directed by Danny Boyle with the Beatles phenomenon as its backdrop, hit theaters. In the trailer, in addition to Himesh Patel and Lily James, a recently exited “Blade Runner 2049” Ana de Armas appears to serve as the protagonist’s love interest, or at least introduce a little emotional conflict. To the surprise of the audience in theaters, there is no trace of the Cuban actress in the film, who was completely eliminated from the final cut.

When years later two men named Conor Woulfe and Peter Michael Rosza, aged 38 and 44 respectively, rented the film for 3.99 on Amazon expecting to meet Armas, and thinking he would have at least some weight “substantial” in the storyline, they felt outraged, deceived and offended, so much so that they sued Universal “false and misleading advertising”. They asked, in addition to the $4 they had already spent, compensation of up to 5 million dollars from the distributor as “relief”, of what we assume would be a great trauma. The most interesting thing is that now a judge has more or less given him the reason.

As reported by Deadline, Steven Wilson, a district judge, ruled on Dec. 20 “Universal is right that trailers involve some creativity and editorial license, but this creativity must not exceed the commercial nature of a trailer”rejecting the company’s attempts to get the lawsuit dismissed; “In essence, a trailer is an advertisement designed to sell a film by giving consumers a sneak peek of it,” Keep saying the sentence you can read here.

The screenwriter of ‘Yesterday’, Richard Curtis, explained that in the test it passes audiences disliked Armas’ character for trying to break up the lead couple. The actress is no longer in promotional materials, not even listed in the cast on IMDb, but she remained in the trailer, creating all this mess.

And now that?

It is true that what this judge resolved was not the lawsuit itself, but whether or not there were legal grounds for, in fact, starting the judicial process: “Since the plaintiffs have plausibly claimed that the trailer is false commercial talk, Plaintiffs can proceed with their claim without offending the First Amendment.” The First Amendment is the one that protects freedom of expression, of the press, of assembly and the right to seek compensation from the government for grievances.

With this decision by Judge Wilson, a precedent could be established that affects all types of productions and strategies, and not just cases like this one in which, due to editing, one or more plots have been left out of the final film. It’s not uncommon for it to be this big majors of Hollywood decide, for example, to modify some scenes to save surprises by eliminating characters or imply that the tone of a production is different from what audiences will find in theaters, a bit like it always happened with the cinema of M. Night Shyamalan. If the lawsuit goes to trial and the trial establishes that Universal used deception to sell its product, other distributors may have to avoid getting “creative” in their trailers or face paying large sums of money.