Yesterday (2019) on Netflix
PG-1320191h 56mComedyFantasyMusicRomance
Jack Malik is a struggling musician. A bus hits him during a twelve-second global power failure. He wakes in a world where the Beatles never existed and only he remembers them.
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- Netflix3.3/5
- IMDb6.8/10187,276 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes63%
Trailer
Plot summary
Jack Malik, a singer-songwriter in Lowestoft, plays gigs to tiny crowds. Ellie Appleton, a mathematics teacher who also manages him and has known him since childhood, urges him not to abandon his dreams. During a twelve-second power failure worldwide, a bus strikes him. After he recovers, he sings "Yesterday" for his friends, who take it to be his own writing. He learns that none of them has heard of the group. An online search turns up nothing, and the record in his collection has vanished, so he concludes the band never existed in this reality. He starts passing their songs off as his own. Ellie sets up a demo session with a local producer, Gavin, and a television appearance in the area brings an invitation from the singer Ed Sheeran to open for him in Moscow.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Yesterday (2019)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Scenes with Ana de Armas as a second love interest were cut after test audiences found Jack less sympathetic, but she stayed in early trailers, prompting a $5 million lawsuit against Universal Pictures from two fans who said they were duped into renting the film.
- U.S. District Judge Stephen Wilson let the trailer class action proceed in December 2022, later dismissed it as a self-inflicted injury with no standing to sue, and held the two men liable for $126,705 of Universal's legal fees before they dropped the suit with prejudice in April 2024.
- Jack Barth complained that Richard Curtis took sole credit for the screenplay and damaged him financially, and felt Curtis turned Jack into a success as a mirror of his own career, which began by meeting Rowan Atkinson at Oxford.
- Yesterday began as Jack Barth's 2012 screenplay Cover Version, in which Jack never found fame; Barth, who had struggled for decades to sell scripts, got the idea from thinking that if Star Wars did not exist and he thought of it, he could not sell it.
- The part Ed Sheeran plays was originally written for Coldplay's Chris Martin, who turned it down; Sheeran said Harry Styles was also asked for the role, which Danny Boyle denied.
- Danny Boyle cast Himesh Patel as Jack after hearing him sing the Beatles songs "Yesterday" and "Back in the U.S.S.R." at his audition, feeling his voice had soul; Patel sang and played guitar and piano himself in the film.
- The soundtrack had Patel performing several Beatles songs with Adem Ilhan as music supervisor, and licensing the band's discography for the film cost its producers close to $10 million.
