A few seconds of footage turned into one of the odder legal fights in recent Hollywood history. Ana de Armas showed up in ads for the 2019 film Yesterday, but she never appeared in the finished movie.
Two fans felt tricked, sued Universal Pictures over it, and spent more than two years fighting the case out in court. The case ended in 2024, and not in the way either side expected when it began.
Why Ana de Armas Never Made the Final Cut
Yesterday follows Jack Malik, a struggling musician played by Himesh Patel, who gets hit by a bus during a freak global blackout and wakes up in a world where nobody remembers the Beatles.
Realizing he is the only person left who knows the songs, he starts performing them as his own and becomes a star almost overnight. Lily James plays Ellie, his manager and eventual love interest, while Kate McKinnon plays his cutthroat music agent. Danny Boyle directed the film from a script by Richard Curtis.
Ana de Armas had already drawn notice for her role in Blade Runner 2049 by the time she joined the cast, and she would go on to bigger fame afterward in Knives Out, the James Bond film, and Blonde.
During filming, de Armas joined the cast as Roxanne, a famous singer who meets Jack after his rise to fame and pulls his attention away from Ellie. The scene, shot on a recreation of James Corden’s talk show set, made it into the movie’s earliest trailers. It never made it into theaters.
Curtis later told CinemaBlend that the decision still stung: “That was a very traumatic cut, because she was brilliant in it.” Test screenings showed that audiences did not like watching Jack’s eyes wander toward another woman, since it made his devotion to Ellie feel weaker.
Cutting Roxanne kept the central romance clean, even though Curtis said he lost some of his favorite material in the process.
Yesterday opened in June 2019 and earned about $155 million worldwide against a $26 million budget. Despite that box office total, studio accounting reportedly left Universal recording a loss of nearly $90 million on paper, according to Collider.
None of those numbers had anything to do with de Armas, whose scenes stayed out of public view except in the marketing that came before release.
A $5 Million Lawsuit Over a Missing Actress
In January 2022, Peter Michael Rosza of San Diego and Conor Woulfe of Maryland filed a proposed class action against Universal. Both men said the trailer led them to expect de Armas would play a real role in the story, so they each paid $3.99 to rent Yesterday on Amazon Prime. When her scenes never showed up, they argued they had paid for something they did not get.
The lawsuit asked for $5 million in damages for false advertising, unjust enrichment, and unfair competition. The complaint, detailed by Rolling Stone, claimed Universal leaned on “Ms. De Armas’s fame, radiance and brilliance to promote the film,” arguing that Patel and James were not famous enough on their own to guarantee ticket and rental sales.
Judge Stephen Wilson let an early version of the case move forward, ruling that movie trailers count as commercial speech, which means they have to meet the same honesty standards as any other advertisement.
That single ruling raised the stakes for the whole film industry, since a win for the plaintiffs could have changed how studios are allowed to cut a trailer together. Universal, for its part, argued throughout the case that trailers are creative works entitled to First Amendment protection, much like the films they promote.
The Court Calls It a “Self-Inflicted Injury”
Rosza and Woulfe rewrote their complaint more than once as the case moved through 2022 and into 2023. In one version, Woulfe said he had rented Yesterday a second time, this time through Google Play, after noticing that search results still listed de Armas as a cast member. He argued that counted as a brand-new instance of being misled.
Judge Wilson was not persuaded. His ruling, which the Hollywood Reporter described as centered on a “self-inflicted” injury, pointed out that Woulfe already knew from his first rental that de Armas’ scenes were missing, so renting the film again could not count as a new deception.
Wilson dismissed the case entirely and refused to let the plaintiffs try again, as The Guardian first reported at the time. ScreenRant reported that the judge called any further changes to the complaint “a futility,” noting that this was already the third time it had been rewritten.
With that, the class action was denied and the core claims against Universal were closed for good, at least on paper.
Legal Fees Turn a Small Case Into a Costly One
Winning the dismissal was not the end of Universal’s involvement in the case. Because the studio prevailed under California’s anti-SLAPP law, a rule designed to stop lawsuits aimed at punishing people for speaking out publicly, it earned the right to recover its legal costs from the plaintiffs.
Universal’s lead attorney, Kelly Klaus, bills $1,158 an hour, and the studio asked the court for $472,000 to cover two rounds of motions. Judge Wilson thought that figure ran too high.
In comments picked up by Variety, he wrote that modern law firms are “neither eleemosynary nor altruistic” and cut the award down to roughly $126,705.
Instead of walking away, the plaintiffs’ legal team kept filing new discovery requests, which only added to Universal’s bill. The studio eventually asked the court to sanction the opposing lawyers, arguing the case had lost any real value once its class action status was denied.
One of Universal’s attorneys, Stephanie Herrera, wrote in a filing that the opposing side was pressuring the studio over “a case that is now worth $7.98,” a reference to the total the two men had spent renting the movie in the first place.
The Two-Year Battle Finally Ends
By early 2024, both sides were negotiating a way out. Reports say the plaintiffs’ team floated a $750,000 lump-sum settlement offer, while Universal pushed back against paying anything at all. A hearing on the sanctions motion was set for April 30, with a trial date on the calendar for May 21, but the two sides settled before either date arrived.
On April 12, 2024, attorneys for both parties told the court they had reached an agreement. The terms became public on April 18: Rosza and Woulfe would receive no money and would drop the case with prejudice, while Universal agreed not to collect the fee award the court had already handed it.
Neither side commented publicly on the outcome. The one lasting mark the case left behind is Judge Wilson’s early ruling that movie trailers count as commercial speech, a legal standard that could resurface the next time a studio decides what stays in a trailer and what gets left on the cutting room floor.
Yesterday has not disappeared from the spotlight since the lawsuit wrapped up. In June 2026, Boyle and Curtis announced plans to adapt the film into a West End stage musical, more than seven years after a few seconds of Ana de Armas on screen first caught fans’ attention enough to land Universal in court.