The disgruntled ‘Fast & Furious’ fan who sued Ryan Gosling movie ‘Drive’

Controversies surrounding movie trailers are nothing new. Directors don’t cut the promotional content for their films, which leaves the door wide open for the marketing department to give away huge plot points for the sake of showing exciting moments that will entice audiences into the cinema. 

The trailer for Cast Away, for example, very clearly showed Tom Hanks making it home alive, essentially ruining the suspense of the entire film. In the trailer for Blade Runner: 2049, the studio insisted that Harrison Ford appear, even though director Denis Villeneuve wanted the reprisal of his character to be a surprise reveal. In one particularly shambolic case, fans sued the distributors of Danny Boyle’s 2019 romantic comedy Yesterday because, contrary to what the trailer showed, Ana de Armas is not actually in the movie.

It might seem unlikely, but there have actually been multiple lawsuits over movie trailers. One of the most imaginative was levelled at Nicolas Winding Refn’s 2011 thriller, Drive, in which Ryan Gosling plays a stunt driver who gets tangled up in criminal activity. The trailer suggests that it’s an action movie full of virtuosic gear shifting and the seductive revving of engines. Instead, the film is a chilly thriller in which Gosling nibbles a toothpick and says almost nothing while falling in love with his neighbour (Carey Mulligan). The action takes place at the end, and car chases don’t have much to do with it.

Still, it seemed like wishful thinking when a woman in the US state of Michigan filed a lawsuit against FilmDistrict Distribution, claiming that the trailer had been misleading and had lured her into buying a ticket on false pretences. As reported by Entertainment Weekly, Sarah Deming’s court filing said, among other things, “Drive was promoted as very similar to Fast and Furious, when in actuality, it wasn’t,” and “Drive bore very little similarity to a chase, or race action film, for reasons including but not limited to Drive having very little driving in the motion picture.” 

She wasn’t wrong, but few fans would have been quite so outraged as to sue over it. You might assume that the case was thrown out immediately, never to be heard from again, but it lingered in the courts for more than six years. Part of the issue was her separate allegation that the film was antisemitic, presumably because one of the villains, played by Albert Brooks, is Jewish and connected to the Mob.

As reported by The Hollywood Reporter, the first judge in the case dismissed the 2012 lawsuit outright, but Deming and her lawyer tried to get the judge removed from the case, alleging that he himself was antisemitic. This sent the suit to the state court of appeals, which handed down its own ruling the following year. It concluded, “Any affirmative representations the trailer made about being a racing movie were not inaccurate; the movie contains driving scenes… Moreover, plaintiff, contrary to her hyperbole, does not refer us to any actual violence against, or even criticism of, Jews that has resulted from the film being shown.”

Still, this was not the end of the saga. By the time the Hollywood Reporter checked in on the case in 2017, it was still slogging its way through the courts. At that stage, Deming’s lawyer was the plaintiff and Deming herself no longer appeared to be connected to the suit. Having failed to get the case heard by the Michigan Supreme Court, Martin H Leaf filed a new lawsuit in which he alleged a conspiracy involving Refn, Brooks, Sony Pictures, Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Google, and AMC. The case did not appear to go anywhere. 

This lawsuit may have been an outlier, but if there’s one thing movie studios can learn from the ordeal, it’s that they should really stop ruining their own movies for the sake of selling them to audience members who are either going to feel cheated out of a climactic reveal, or cheated out of the film they thought they were going to see.

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