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Two men have filed a class action lawsuit against Universal Pictures alleging the production company misled them into renting the film. Yesterday.
The plaintiffs argue that the Cuban actress Ana de Armas appeared in the trailer for Yesterday, but not in the film itself, for which they are seeking compensation of at least $5 million. Both rented the film on Amazon Prime Video for $3.99.
Yesterday is a 2019 film starring Himesh Patel and Lily James. Jack Malik, a failed singer-songwriter, experiences a supernatural event that makes him the only person on Earth who remembers the Beatles. Malik takes advantage of the situation to appropriate the songs of the British band and jump to stardom.
According Cinema Blend, Ana de Armas played a secondary character named Roxanne. Roxane became a love interest for Malik when he was already famous. A scene was shot in which Himesh Patel sings to Ana de Armas a version of Something by George Harrison as a serenade, but it was cut because test screening audiences didn’t like that Malik deviated from his main love interest in the film, played by Lily James.
“It was a very traumatic cut, because she was brilliant. Really radiant,” Richard Curtis, the film’s screenwriter, told Cinema Blend. “It had some of our favorite scenes from the movie, but we had to cut them out for the sake of the whole.”
Ana de Armas was featured in the trailer, and now Conor Woulfe, 38, and Peter Michael Rosza, 44, are accusing Universal of deceptive marketing and seeking to recover at least $5 million on behalf of affected consumers.
“Because consumers were promised a movie with Ana de Armas in the trailer for Yesterday, but received a movie with no appearance by Ana de Armas, said consumers were not provided any value for their rental or purchase, ”says the lawsuit, published by Variety.
There is a precedent that ended badly for the plaintiff. In 2011, a man filed a lawsuit against the producers of the film Drive. The man claimed that the trailer made it seem like a “high-speed driving action movie,” and not a slow-paced interpersonal drama peppered with graphic violence. A court of appeals dismissed the case for various reasons, including that the trailer was not misleading.
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