Ana de Armas fans achieve potential Pyrrhic victory in Yesterday trailer suit

In a lawsuit that people will probably remember as much as they did the Beatles’ music in the movie Yesterday (or the fact that there was a movie called Yesterday about people forgetting the Beatles at all), plaintiffs Peter Rosza and Conor Woulfe have finally settled with Universal after they initially sued the studio for false advertising in 2022. (Details of the settlement have not been disclosed.) The reason? The two men claim they were duped after choosing to rent the film because Ana de Armas was in the trailer, only to learn that her scenes were viciously cut from the finished product because they didn’t play well with test audiences. What a waste of $3.99!

Only now, that $3.99 is probably looking about as good to Rosza and Woulfe as de Armas did in the Yesterday trailer. Now that all is said and done, the two men are on the hook for $126,705 in Universal legal fees (per Variety), not to mention the two whole years they wasted in court. Think of how many times they could have watched Knives Out or even Ghosted instead! Sad… their troubles really could have been so far away.

Rosza and Woulfe did achieve a small potential victory for future jilted de Armas stans, however. In December 2022, a judge initially ruled in favor of the plaintiffs and against Universal, who claimed that trailers count as “artistic, expressive work” and therefore cannot be regulated as “commercial speech.” That’s wrong, according to the judge. “At its core, a trailer is an advertisement designed to sell a movie by providing consumers with a preview of the movie,” he wrote, meaning that anyone could hypothetically bring legal action in the future if de Armas is cut from anything after the film is advertised, or even if her (or any actor’s) role isn’t as juicy or central as they thought the trailer suggested.

That likely won’t happen, however, considering how badly all of this tanked. Last August, a judge dismissed the suit because one of the plaintiffs thought de Armas might pop up if he rented the movie again. (She didn’t.) Then Rosza and Woulfe’s attorneys failed to garner true class action status by proving anyone else had suffered a great loss over de Armas’ erasure, meaning this was mostly just a whole lot of noise and wasted time around two guys being kind of bummed out.

At least it seemed like they really annoyed Universal. “The attorneys who filed and sunk two years into this frivolous case are trying to pressure Universal into making a huge monetary payment (with no legal or factual basis) to end a case that is now worth $7.98,” wrote one of the studio’s lawyers (via Variety). No one tell any of them that all of this could have been avoided by watching de Armas’ 4-minute and 44-second deleted scene on YouTube.