The legal dispute over Ana de Armas’ brief appearance in the trailer of Yesterday, despite not featuring in the final film, has been quashed by a judge.
You may recall a story that emerged all the way back from early 2022, when we learned that Universal was being sued with a class action lawsuit that accused it of misleading audiences by featuring Ana de Armas in the trailer for the film Yesterday. The problem? de Armas does not feature in the final film.
It took almost a year before it was confirmed that the case would indeed be heading to the courtroom, with the eventual lawsuit stating: ‘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.’
Furthermore, the use of The Beatles’ track Something in the trailer, which also doesn’t appear in the final film, was named as a further complaint as the accusers sought $5m in damages. We remember wondering at the time if a victory for the complainants might set a new precedent for the use of music in trailers which was never intended for use in the finished movie.
Well, according to Deadline, that won’t be happening as the case did indeed make it to court where the judge in question tossed the case out whilst also decreeing that it could not be amended in any way and brought before the court again. The outlet’s coverage of the final verdict suggests that at one point in the proceedings, the judge seemed to be weighing up the complaint seriously, speaking about a trailer’s ‘commercial nature’ despite a studio’s need for ‘creativity and editorial discretion’.
However, upon final verdict the judge also pointed out that the complainants had been unable to satisfactorily explain why they’d rented the film from two different vendors, including a rental from Google after beginning the legal dispute. The decision ends what seemed like a fairly spurious legal challenge and means that studios will retain a healthy level of ‘creativity and editorial discretion’ which on the balance of things, is probably a good thing.
Now, if anybody is going to get a class action lawsuit that goes after studios for the trailers they put out, can we sue them for showing too much of a film’s plot please?
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