I first heard about Fyre right after it happened because a vlogger, Mark Dohner, posted it on his YouTube channel. He stated that he had considered going, but in the end, didn't. Now I haven't heard about this festival since then, so I was surprised to hear that Netflix and Hulu were both doing documentaries on this, more than a year after it happened
About two weeks ago, Netflix and Hulu almost simultaneously released different documentaries about the 2017 disaster that was Fyre Festival. For anyone who doesn't know, Fyre was supposed to be a grand music festival in Great Exuma, an island in the Bahamas, and was supposed to be the next Coachella. Tickets ran as much as a few hundred to a couple hundred thousand dollars and included food, a villa or luxury tent, and access to bands such as blink 182, G.O.O.D. Music, Major Lazer, and many more.
It took about six months to put the Fyre festival together. From the documentaries, it seemed like, in the beginning, all of their advertising was on Instagram. Pages would post the same orange photo and would either have the tag for the Frye page or it would be the promo video. The video featured various models, from Bella Hadid to Hailey Baldwin/Bieber, having a good time in the Bahamas. For people scrolling through their Instagram pages, seeing all of these orange posts and videos of what the festival was supposed to look and be like, of course, they sold out. Not only did they sell out, but they also sold more tickets than they had room.
During this time, they didn't have an island to hold the festival, because they were told to not have the festival on the original island from the promo video, didn't have enough villas to hold people, and had to build everything from scratch. In the Hulu documentary, it was touched on that this should have taken a year to a year and a half to do, but the festival was less than six months away. When it came time for the festival, it was a disaster. The luxury tents were old hurricane relief tents, there were no music acts, there wasn't much of anything. In the end, almost no one was paid for their work, and even the employees working at the festival weren't correctly paid.
While both of the documentaries are on the same topic, they're both slightly different. Hulu gave more of an overview and an interview Billy McFarland, the main man in charge, whereas Netflix seemed more in depth leading up to and the aftermath of the festival, as well as interviews with more people who took part of putting the festival together, including the residents of Great Exumas who helped. I thought it was interesting to hear about the festival from Billy's perspective, although it seemed like he was mostly defending himself. Both documentaries touched on how Billy continuously lied to his staff and investors about money. I liked the Netflix one slightly more, but they were both well done.
- Fyre Home | Bullhorn ›
- Watch FYRE FRAUD Streaming Online | Hulu (Free Trial) ›
- Fyre Festival: Here's what happened vs. expectations - Business ... ›
- Fyre Fight: The Inside Story of How We Got Two Warring Fyre ... ›
- Fyre Festival: My front-row seat for the chaos in the Exumas - BBC ... ›
- Fyre (2019) - IMDb ›
- FYRE: The Greatest Party That Never Happened | Official Trailer [HD ... ›
- Fyre Festival Documentary Bows on Netflix in January 2019 ... ›
- Fyre Festival - Wikipedia ›
- FYRE: The Greatest Party That Never Happened | Netflix Official Site ›