The Movie That Advertised a Woman Who Wasn’t In It

By David Mason

There is something almost perfectly cinematic about the Ana de Armas lawsuit. A woman appears in the trailer for a movie. She is beautiful, famous, and given enough screen time to suggest that she matters. Audiences see her, remember her, and perhaps decide to spend $3.99 to watch the film.

Then the movie begins.

She isn't there.

That was the strange predicament at the centre of the lawsuit brought against Universal Pictures by Conor Woulfe and Peter Rosza, two men who rented Yesterday, the 2019 romantic comedy directed by Danny Boyle and written by Richard Curtis. Both had seen Ana de Armas in the film's trailer. Both paid $3.99 to rent the movie through Amazon Prime. Neither found her in it.

The discrepancy sounds trivial until one considers what a movie trailer actually is. We tend to think of trailers as miniature works of cinema: compressed versions of a film's atmosphere, characters, jokes, mysteries, explosions, and romances. But a trailer has another function that is less romantic and more commercial. It is an advertisement. Its purpose is to persuade you to spend money on something you have not yet seen.

The Yesterday case therefore raised an unexpectedly interesting question: How much of a movie can an advertisement promise before the promise itself becomes legally meaningful?

Ana de Armas had not merely been a fleeting extra in the production. She had filmed a substantial subplot as Roxanne, a woman whom Jack Malik, the film's protagonist, encounters while his career as the world's only person who remembers the Beatles begins to take off. The sequence included Jack performing “Something” for Roxanne.

And then the material disappeared.

The decision was not, apparently, the result of some dramatic studio scandal. Test audiences reportedly disliked the effect the subplot had on the central romance between Jack and Ellie. Roxanne created another romantic possibility when the filmmakers wanted the emotional centre of the film to remain Jack and Ellie. The solution was brutally simple from an editing perspective: remove her.

The trailer, however, survived.

That created the peculiar situation in which Ana de Armas could be seen selling a movie in which she no longer appeared.

Woulfe and Rosza sued Universal in 2022, seeking at least $5 million and attempting to turn their complaint into a class action. Their argument was straightforward. They had seen an advertisement featuring de Armas, believed she was in the movie, paid $3.99 to rent the movie, and discovered that the advertised material was absent.

Universal argued that a reasonable viewer understands that trailers contain material that may ultimately be removed. A trailer is not necessarily a contractual inventory of every frame that will appear in the finished film.

At first, the court did not simply dismiss the idea.

In December 2022, Judge Stephen Wilson ruled that a movie trailer could constitute commercial speech and therefore could potentially be evaluated under false-advertising law. That was the part of the case that captured the public imagination.

But the ruling did not say that Universal had committed false advertising. Nor did it establish that every trailer must contain precisely what it shows. The decision was narrower: a trailer's status as a creative work does not automatically place it beyond the reach of advertising law.

That distinction matters.

Hollywood has always operated in the space between art and salesmanship. A trailer can be beautiful, funny, mysterious, misleading, truthful, manipulative, or all of these things at once. It can reveal the best joke in a comedy, the most spectacular explosion in an action movie, or a character who will later be removed altogether.

The Yesterday case briefly exposed that machinery.

But the plaintiffs ultimately did not win.

In August 2023, the lawsuit was dismissed. Among the problems facing the plaintiffs was the question of injury. One of the plaintiffs had subsequently rented Yesterday again, making it considerably harder to maintain the argument that the original rental had produced the kind of legally recognizable injury required for the case to continue.

The legal consequences became particularly expensive. The plaintiffs were ordered to pay Universal $126,705 in legal fees.

A lawsuit that had begun with two viewers spending $3.99 each had now produced a legal-fee dispute worth more than $126,000.

Then, in April 2024, the case finally ended in a settlement. The plaintiffs received no monetary recovery, while Universal's $126,705 fee award was ultimately waived as part of the resolution. The case was dropped entirely.

So the internet version of the story—that two men spent $3.99, sued Universal for $5 million, and a judge permanently established that movie trailers must tell the truth—is too neat.

The real story is stranger.

The plaintiffs lost. Universal did not pay them $5 million. They did not receive $126,705, or even $1. There was no judicial declaration that every trailer must contain everything it depicts. There was no new universal rule governing Hollywood marketing.

But the case did leave behind a fascinating legal proposition: a trailer can be both a piece of filmmaking and an advertisement.

And that is precisely what makes Ana de Armas's missing performance so compelling.

The footage was real. The actress was real. The character was real. The scenes were actually filmed. The audience did not imagine her.

She existed somewhere between production and release—a performance that was made, edited, advertised, deleted, and then remembered.

There is even a strange afterlife to the vanished character. The home-video editions of Yesterday contain deleted material, including the “Corden & Roxanne” sequence. There, for a few minutes, the missing movie becomes visible. You can watch the character whose presence helped sell the theatrical movie but who never appears in the theatrical movie itself.

Yet there is no officially released complete “Ana de Armas cut” of Yesterday. There is no alternate finished version in which Roxanne's entire subplot has simply been restored.

What exists instead is a kind of cinematic archaeological record: the theatrical film, the trailer, the deleted scenes, and the lawsuit.

Together they tell a story about how movies are actually made.

We often imagine a film as a fixed object. The director conceives it, the actors perform it, the cameras capture it, the editors assemble it, and eventually the audience watches it. But filmmaking is less like carving a statue than constructing a city. Streets are built and demolished. Buildings are completed and abandoned. Entire neighbourhoods can disappear before anyone moves in.

Ana de Armas's Yesterday is one of those demolished neighbourhoods.

And the trailer became its ghost.

The most enduring irony is that the lawsuit was never really about whether Ana de Armas was good enough to remain in the movie. It was about what happens when the machinery of promotion preserves an image after the creative decision behind that image has been reversed.

The filmmakers changed their minds.

The advertisement did not.

For audiences, that may be the most revealing part of the entire episode. We usually encounter a movie only after thousands of decisions have already been made: performances shortened, characters removed, endings rewritten, scenes reshot, stories rearranged. The trailer gives us a glimpse of a movie that may never actually exist.

In the case of Yesterday, that hypothetical movie briefly had Ana de Armas in it.

And for $3.99, two viewers discovered that they had bought a ticket to the other one.

Who to Watch on YouTube: Joe Folley’s Unsolicited Advice and the Seven Levels of Logic

Charles Scholx

3 min read

August 2026

As part of my series on interesting and worthwhile YouTube creators, one channel worth watching is Unsolicited Advice, created by Joe Folley. It is a rare example of a channel built around philosophy, logic, and serious intellectual questions that has managed to find a large modern audience.

The channel was created in January 2023 and has grown remarkably quickly. As of 2026, public channel tracking sites estimate that Unsolicited Advice has approximately:

• 950,000+ subscribers
• 67–68 million total views
• Around 260–270 videos

For a philosophy and education channel, those numbers are impressive. It demonstrates that there is still a significant audience for long-form ideas when they are presented clearly and accessibly.

Joe Folley’s background adds credibility to the channel. He studied philosophy at Cambridge University, with particular interest in logic, and his videos often combine academic knowledge with a conversational style. Instead of presenting philosophy as something locked away in universities, he approaches it as something connected to ordinary life: how we think, argue, believe, and understand the world.

One of his videos, “The 7 Levels of Logic,” is a good example of what makes the channel interesting.

The video presents logic as a progression from everyday reasoning to professional research.

The first level is Pre-Logic. This is where most people operate: they have an instinctive sense that some arguments seem convincing and others do not, but they lack a formal framework for explaining why.

The second level is the Fallacy-Monger. At this stage, people learn to identify common mistakes in reasoning, such as ad hominem attacks, appeals to authority, and other informal fallacies. This is a useful beginning, but logic is much deeper than simply spotting mistakes in arguments.

The third level is Basic Formal Logic. Here reasoning becomes mathematical. Propositional logic introduces symbols, truth tables, and logical connectives such as “and,” “or,” and “if-then.” Arguments can now be tested with precision rather than intuition.

The fourth level is First-Order Logic and Friends. This expands logic into more complex statements involving concepts like “for all” and “there exists,” along with connections to mathematics, sets, and probability.

The fifth level moves into Specialized Logical Systems. This includes areas such as modal logic, which studies necessity and possibility; epistemic logic, which examines knowledge and belief; and formal semantics, which explores meaning in language.

The sixth level is Metamathematics and Metalogic: logic studying itself. This includes questions about consistency, completeness, and Gödel’s famous incompleteness theorems, which showed that even powerful mathematical systems have limits.

The seventh level is Current Logic Research. At this stage, logic becomes an active professional field connected with mathematics, computer science, artificial intelligence, linguistics, and philosophy.

What makes this video interesting personally is that I am familiar with six of the seven levels. That does not mean I am an expert in them. Far from it. Some areas are much more familiar than others, and like many people who have studied these subjects, I am also a bit rusty. Knowing about modal logic or Gödel’s theorems is very different from actively working in those fields.

That is also one of the strengths of Joe Folley’s presentation. It reminds viewers that there is a difference between recognizing a subject, understanding its basic structure, and mastering it professionally. Logic is not just a collection of tricks for winning arguments online. It is a centuries-long discipline that has shaped mathematics, philosophy, computer science, and our understanding of reasoning itself.

The appeal of Unsolicited Advice is that it makes these enormous subjects approachable. It invites viewers to move beyond simple opinions and explore the deeper machinery behind human thought.

For anyone interested in philosophy, critical thinking, artificial intelligence, mathematics, or simply understanding how people reason, Joe Folley’s channel is worth watching. 

 

The Average Song Doesn't Exist

One of the most revealing questions in music today is almost embarrassingly simple. On any given day, how many times is the average song played on Spotify?

At first glance the arithmetic appears trivial. Spotify now hosts roughly one hundred million tracks, while listeners collectively generate on the order of twenty-three billion streams each day. Divide one by the other and the answer emerges with almost mathematical indifference: approximately 230 plays per song per day.

It is a remarkably modest number.

For independent musicians, accustomed to measuring themselves against artists accumulating millions of streams, this figure can feel almost implausible. It suggests that a song averaging only a few hundred daily plays is not languishing in obscurity at all. It is, at least by one legitimate metric, outperforming the average member of Spotify's immense catalogue.

Yet this is also where arithmetic begins to deceive.

The "average song" does not actually exist. It is a statistical phantom, conjured by an ecosystem whose attention is distributed less like a smooth curve than like a mountain range. A handful of global hits absorb extraordinary quantities of listening while millions of songs receive only a trickle of attention—or none whatsoever. The blockbuster does not merely succeed; it distorts the landscape around it.

This is a familiar phenomenon in economics, where a small number of billionaires can inflate the average wealth of an entire population. Spotify operates according to a similar logic. The arithmetic mean faithfully reports the total volume of listening, but it says surprisingly little about the experience of a typical song.

The median—the point at which half of all songs perform better and half perform worse—is almost certainly dramatically lower. While the precise figure is not publicly available, it is reasonable to infer that the median song receives only a handful of plays on a typical day, and countless tracks receive none at all.

That distinction matters.

If your music averages more than roughly 230 streams per day, you have exceeded the arithmetic average across Spotify's entire catalogue. More importantly, you have almost certainly surpassed the experience of the overwhelming majority of songs on the platform. What initially appears to be an unremarkable number is, in reality, evidence that your work is attracting a disproportionate share of one of the world's most competitive resources: human attention.

This reframes the psychology of streaming.

Musicians often compare themselves upward—to platinum artists, viral sensations, and algorithmic anomalies. But this is a profoundly skewed comparison. It is akin to judging one's financial health exclusively against the Forbes billionaire list. The comparison is emotionally potent but statistically incoherent.

The more meaningful question is not, "How many streams does Taylor Swift receive?" The more revealing question is, "Out of one hundred million competing songs, how much of humanity's listening have I captured today?"

Seen through that lens, 1,000 daily streams is no longer merely a modest milestone. It represents more than four times the arithmetic average. Ten thousand daily streams is not simply "doing okay"; it places a song into a remarkably rare echelon of sustained attention. Even a few hundred consistent listeners begin to look less like a disappointment and more like an improbable achievement against the staggering abundance of available music.

The streaming era has produced a peculiar cognitive illusion. We are surrounded by astronomical numbers—billions of streams, hundreds of millions of users, catalogs so vast that no human lifetime could meaningfully explore them. Against this backdrop, anything less than viral success can feel insignificant.

Statistics tell a different story.

The average song on Spotify is not a cultural phenomenon. It is not trending on social media, featured on editorial playlists, or filling stadiums. It is simply one voice among a hundred million others, competing for a finite reservoir of attention.

Perhaps the most important metric an artist can cultivate, then, is not envy but proportion. Success is not measured solely by absolute numbers; it is measured by where those numbers stand within the ecology that produced them. In an environment containing one hundred million competitors and roughly twenty-three billion daily listening decisions, earning more than two hundred and thirty plays a day is not merely beating an average. It is outperforming the silent majority of recorded music itself.

Spotify Daily Streams	Interpretation
0–10 streams/day	The fate of millions of songs. Heard occasionally—or not at all.
10–100 streams/day	A modest but genuine audience. The song is consistently finding listeners.
≈230 streams/day	The arithmetic average across Spotify's entire catalogue of roughly 100 million songs. Exceeding this means outperforming the catalogue-wide average.
1,000 streams/day	A healthy independent release with meaningful, sustained attention—roughly four times the catalogue average.
10,000 streams/day	Significant traction. The song has broken well beyond the statistical norm and is attracting substantial audience attention.
100,000+ streams/day	A major independent hit or a respectable label release. At this level, the song has become a significant cultural object rather than simply another upload.

Important Caveat: The figure of 230 streams per day is an arithmetic mean, not the experience of the "typical" song. Spotify's listening follows a power-law distribution: a relatively small number of blockbuster songs accumulate extraordinary numbers of streams while millions of tracks receive few or none. Consequently, the median song almost certainly receives far fewer than 230 streams per day. Surpassing 230 daily streams therefore means exceeding not only the catalogue-wide arithmetic average but almost certainly outperforming the overwhelming majority of songs on the platform.

 

JOKE BY PETER

You, who worry about Democrats versus Republicans--relax, here is our real problem.

In a Purdue University classroom, they were discussing the qualifications to be President of the United States.

It was pretty simple. The candidate must be a natural born citizen of at least 35 years of age.

However, one girl in the class immediately started in on how unfair was the requirement to be a natural born citizen. In short, her opinion was that this requirement prevented many capable individuals from becoming president.

 

The class was taking it in and letting her rant, and many jaws hit the floor when she wrapped up her argument by stating "What makes a natural born citizen any more qualified to lead this country than one born by C-section?"

Yep, these are the same kinds of 18-year-olds that are now voting in our elections!