Looks like a federal judge believes in Yesterday.
A year and a half ago Paul Michael Rosza and Conor Woulfe filed a $5 million lawsuit against Universal over Ana de Armas appearing in the trailer for the 2019 Danny Boyle-directed Yesterday, but being absent from the film itself.
Yesterday, U.S. District Stephen Wilson tossed the whole thing out.
Rejecting the plaintiff’s notion of “misrepresentation” in de Armas’ absence as a love interest from the Himesh Patel-led Beatles themed rom-com the judge agreed with the Comcast-owned studio the case is a “self-inflicted injury.”
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And, as well as also denying Rosza and Woulfe’s desire for class certification, Judge Wilson ordered this much amended case to truly be over for good. “In each prior dismissal, the Court has clearly delineated the pitfalls of the complaint and allowed successive amendments,” he wrote in an August 28 order. “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.”
Perhaps pushing Judge Wilson to that endgame was Woulfe’s renting the film again online after the lawsuit started in January 2022 and claiming new “misrepresentations on Google” of the Blonde star actually being in 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,” the judge said in the rather brisk nine-page order.
Universal did not respond to request for comment on yesterday’s Yesterday decision. If and when they do, we will up date this post.
The whole thing was spawned by California-based Rosza and Maryland-based Woulfe respectively in July and October of 2021 renting Yesterday off Amazon Prime Video after seeing a trailer for the picture. In said trailer in the movie about a going nowhere musician who wakes up knowing almost every song by the Beatles in a world where the Fab Four never existed, there is a brief scene with de Armas catching the eye of Patel’s Jack Malik character.
However, the actress’ role ended up on the cutting room floor of the Richard Curtis penned project. Unlike the Paul McCartney and John Lennon song “Yesterday,” the filmmakers did know why she had to go “I think the audience did not like the fact that his eyes even strayed,” Curtis told Cinamablend in 2019 of why de Armas and her subplot was cut from the May 2019 release film.
That wasn’t enough for Rosza and Woulfe.
“Defendant’s advertising and promotion of the movie Yesterday is false, misleading, and deceptive,” their January 21, 2022 lawsuit said of Universal.
Judge Wilson seemed to be in line with that argument, at least last December.
“Universal is correct that trailers involve some creativity and editorial discretion, but this creativity does not outweigh the commercial nature of a trailer,” he wrote in a December 20 ruling on an unsuccessful motion by Universal to dismiss a class action by the plaintiffs
But that was yesterday, and this is now – and today Yesterday is OK.
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