Ana de Armas is one of today’s stars. Who wouldn’t want to see the hypnotic star of Blonde, the newest Bond girl, the youngest Oscar nominee, on screen? And above all: who wouldn’t want to see it if he had promised? It would be a huge disappointment, but what price do disappointments have? That’s what two American men, Peter Michael Rosza and Conor Woulfe, thought, who a few months ago rented the film Yesterday on the Amazon Prime Video platform for $3.99, about 3.5 euros for it. They hoped to meet the Spanish-Cuban interpreter, as the trailer in which she appeared had promised them. But not. De Armas was nowhere to be found. She was cut from the footage at the last minute. And they set the price for this disappointment: five million dollars. They sued Universal for that amount in 2022. Now, a year and a half after the lawsuit was filed, a judge has dismissed the lawsuit.
Rosza (45, lives in San Diego, Southern California and rented the film in July 2021) and Woulfe (39, lives in Maryland, 39, and rented it in October of the same year) asked the judge to compensate them for the damages caused. They wanted to see De Armas. So much so that Woulfe even rented the film a second time, in this case via Google Play, the video platform of the giant Google, under the assumption that the actress would appear there, in the director’s version. But it wasn’t like that either.
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In fact, in the trailer for Danny Boyle’s film, released in February 2019, which aroused great expectations and received a million views on YouTube on the first day, De Armas appeared. The protagonist of the feature was Jack (played by Himesh Patel), a British musician whose career is failing and who suffers a bicycle accident on the same day as a global blackout; When he wakes up, he realizes that only he remembers the Beatles songs. In screenwriter Richard Curtis’ romantic comedy, Lily James (Downton Abbey, Cinderella) played Ellie, his friend, confidant and manager who gradually became his romantic interest. Ana de Armas played Roxanne, who apparently had a parallel history with Patel, a romance seen in the previous pictures where he sang to her. However, Curtis (“Four Weddings and a Funeral”, “Love Actually”) explained shortly before the premiere that the audience did not fully understand or agree with this parallel flirtation of the protagonist with De Armas and that it was decided to cancel the entire plot of the character in the editing to eliminate space, which is common in large film productions. But it stayed in the trailer for a few seconds.
Rosza and Woulfe’s anger – or perhaps their hope of getting a handful of millions through legal means – led to a lawsuit that California District Judge Stephen Wilson has now dismissed on the grounds that Woulfe in particular had “no authority” to to file a lawsuit because the lawsuit is about “a self-inflicted wound,” and believes there is no reason to believe that “the version of Yesterday you accessed through Google Play would be any different than the ones you saw on “Amazon”.
The actress Ana de Armas poses during the 70th edition of the San Sebastián Film Festival in September 2022, where she presented her film “Blonde”.Juan Herrero (EFE)
The lawsuit accused producer-distributor Universal of false advertising under California state law, unjust enrichment and antitrust violations, and said the project was “unable to rely on the actors’ fame.” , who played the leading role in maximizing ticket sales and rentals, and thus “the defense”. [Universal] “used De Armas’ fame, charisma and brilliance to promote the film by incorporating scenes of him into the promotional images.”
Last December, the judge appeared to lean toward the plaintiffs’ position when he dismissed a countersuit filed by Universal that sought to resolve that initial complaint. He then explained that trailers actually imply “a certain creativity and editorial discretion” and that they are “advertising designed to sell a film by giving the viewer a preview of it.” But now he seems to have grown tired of Rosza and Woulfe’s legal tricks and has finally dismissed their lawsuit, among other things because the plaintiffs have changed their lawsuit up to three times during this time; In fact, they introduced it after renting the movie for the first time and changed it when they rented it on Google Play.
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