Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds are going to try to get Baldoni's defamation suit tossed out

Read about enough big trials, and you start to pick up on some of their rhythms, the expected beats and back-and-forths that happen before anyone gets anywhere close to a courtroom. One big early milestone that you see in a lot of these legal grudge matches—including, tonight, the defamation case Justin Baldoni is bringing against Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds—is the part where the defendants try to get the case against them dismissed outright, before anything else can happen. Getting a dismissal can be a long shot, but if it works, you've not only saved yourself a lot of time and money, but basically gotten a judge to say outright that the claims against you are so ludicrous that they don't even deserve to have their day in court. (And, as a bonus, you skip the discovery phase of the trial, i.e., the bit where any hidden dirty laundry gets tossed out on the lawn for everyone to see.)

Reynolds and Lively's legal teams expressed their intent to pursue the dismissal earlier today, per Deadline; the move comes ahead of a February 3 pretrial hearing, which was, itself, moved up after Lively's side expressed concerns that Baldoni's notably bellicose lawyer, Bryan Freedman, was trying to shift the needle of public perception. Meanwhile, here's Baldoni's notably bellicose lawyer Bryan Freedman, addressing the attempts to dismiss the actor's $400 million defamation suit against the couple: "All these motions to dismiss are just yet another attempt by Ms. Lively, Ryan Reynolds and [publicist] Leslie Sloan to hide and delay the discovery of the hundreds of pages of true facts and well-documented information that we remain dedicated to providing publicly, with full transparency."

Baldoni's suit against Lively and Reynolds, which includes his apparently straight-faced assertions that the "Nicepool" character in last summer's Deadpool & Wolverine was based on him, is distinct from Lively's own suit against Baldoni, which was the match that lit off months of tension between the two It Ends With Us stars when it came out in public back in December. Lively says Baldoni and other people at his Wayfarer Studios first harassed her on the film's set, and then instituted a smear campaign against her during the movie's publicity tour. (Baldoni's stance is that he's the one who's been smeared, natch.) We'd be kind of shocked if Baldoni's case got dismissed at such an early date, honestly—this thing is too loud, and has too many moving parts, for it to be likely for a judge to just say "nothing to see here" and move on—but it's clear that both sides are ready to walk through every step of the dance on the way to an actual trial.