Hulu comes out ahead of Netflix's Fyre Fest documentary with the surprise release of its own
Aux Features Travis Scott
We’ve heard plenty over the past few weeks about Fyre, a new Netflix documentary about the exercise in schadenfreude that was 2017's Fyre Festival. Amidst all the trailers and the news that Fyre was directed by acclaimed documentarian Chris Smith (American Movie, Collapse), it’s been easy to forget that Hulu has a Fyre Fest documentary of its own. This one, which we first reported on last April, comes from Billboard, The Cinemart, and Mic, and is said to “expose what went wrong and who is to blame.”
Well, in a bold move befitting the scandalous material, Hulu has come out ahead of Fyre’s Friday release by dropping its own feature-length dig into the festival with no advance notice. Called Fyre Fraud, it serves not only to undercut its competitor, but also to mark another stone thrown in the ongoing streaming wars, which will only heat up in the coming year.
Fyre Fraud’s got another ace up its sleeve in Fyre Festival founder (and convicted criminal) Billy McFarland, who gives an exclusive interview to directors Jenner Furst and Julia Willoughby Nason. It looks like a good one, too, with the filmmakers straight-up asking the hollow-headed grifter what he thinks about being called a “sociopath.”
“Billy McFarland offers us a window into the mind of a con artist, the insidious charm of the fraudster and how they can capture our imaginations, our investment, and our votes in the age of Trump,” reads a Fyre Fraud press release. “McFarland’s staggering ambition metastasized in a petri dish of late-stage capitalism, corporate greed, and predatory branding, all weaponized by our fear of missing out.”
Watch a trailer for Fyre Fraud below.
Based on that statement and its trailer, Hulu’s documentary appears much more concerned with the economic and cultural implications of the festival. Netflix’s, on the other hand, looks like a harrowing dive into the horrors of the event itself. We say keep ‘em coming. This shit is hilarious.
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It’s like when there were competing Amy Fisher movies. Looking forward to all the other sites coming out with their own.PBS: Downton Fyre
BET: White People Get Jacked
PornHub: Fyre Down Below
History Channel: Fyre Fest – Was It Aliens?
History Channel: Hitler’s Fyre Fest
Discover Channel: Fyre Week
E!: Influencers, the real victims of the Fyre Festival.
SyFy: Fyrenado!
“Billy McFarland offers us a window into the mind of a con artist, the insidious charm of the fraudster and how they can capture our imaginations, our investment, and our votes in the age of Trump,” reads a Fyre Fraud press release. “McFarland’s staggering ambition metastasized in a petri dish of late-stage capitalism, corporate greed, and predatory branding, all weaponized by our fear of missing out.”Bravo to whoever wrote that press release, especially that last sentence.
As I am watching this doc, I can say this people are idiots. Both the promoters and the attendees
That’s what makes the story SO good!!
what a nightmare! people were having panic attacks! b/c their fantasy “art” festival didn’t work out! oh, the humanity!
I mean no real sympathy for the rich dinks who tried to do this, but panic attacks are no joke, and anytime someone makes fun of them I kind of wish they get the kind that makes you think you’re dying for 6 hours so they never joke about it again.
This. I have anxiety and have had a few panic attacks. One of my good friends who never really ‘got’ it had one and ended up at the hospital. First thing I told him was I deal with it all the time. He was blown away. He finally gets it now.
Plus, whether you think these concert-goers had more money than sense or not, they were people who suddenly found themselves on a remote island with very little food or shelter at a festival clearly run by incompetent fraudsters with no care for their safety, and unsure at times how or whether they could get off the island. That’s kinda something to panic about.
I’m torn. I find the idea of watching McFarland trying to defend his disgusting con to be physically repellent. On the other hand, the Netflix documentary might make me inadvertently empathize with spoiled trust fund brats and the kind of idiots who would sell their earthly possessions to get snubbed by Instagram models at a Blink-182 concert on a private island that also had a Sandals resort on it. (Who am I fooling, I am 100% going to watch both of these documentaries.)
I’d like to reassure you that to the extent that McFarland attempts to justify his actions in the footage shown, it’s obviously panicky, rushed, rehearsed-in-a-bad-way postrationalization that does nothing but make him look more guilty, and the documentarians present it as such. Just as often they’ll show him trying and failing to come up with an answer that doesn’t sound hilariously incriminating in-the-moment and it leads to some excellent awkward silences.
Yeah I just finished it and hoo boy. Shouldn’t he be better at this? Really doesn’t speak too well of anyone who talked with the guy for more than 5 minutes and still fell for his bullshit. Nothing about that bro-faced douchebag screams “I can be trusted with millions of dollars and am definitely not a con man”. I also appreciate that they savaged the influencers and media hypers running piggyback grifts, and not just McFarland and Ja Rule. Instagram influencer: We actually had a villa? I felt, like, really bad. *cut to video of her bragging about the size of the kitchen and dancing like an idiot*
Aye, I was a bit worried that the doc would try to humanize him as it kinda did at the start, but the Hulu doc gets fucking savage by the end of it. Also, anyone watching the Netflix doc should be aware of the tiiiiiny conflict of interest it has: The production company is also the company that advertised the Fyre Festival in the first place.
I wonder how many people are subscribers to both Hulu and Netflix. Having competing movies feels like a big deal if you’re releasing both into theaters, but if they’re both just on streaming services, you either subscribe or you don’t. Can’t imagine anyone would sign up just to see one or the other of these.
Then again, I don’t really understand a lot of how the Netflix/Hulu model works over time.
I think a lot of people do subscribe to both. They’re not really expensive if you have disposable income. A lot of people have Amazon Prime as well, of course— and hell, I suspect a lot of Prime members still don’t even know they can watch video. I think the business model is entirely about keeping people from cancelling. It always has to seem like something you want to watch might show up in a few months whenever you have nagging thoughts about “maybe I should cancel”. That’s also why they tend to have long hiatuses between seasons, I think– it’s more valuable to have people knowing Stranger Things Season 3 is dropping eventually than to have it actually drop.
That’s also why they tend to have long hiatuses between seasons, I think— it’s more valuable to have people knowing Stranger Things Season 3 is dropping eventually than to have it actually drop.I’m not sure hiatuses between seasons are due to much beyond the need to write, film, and do post-production each time. Shows like Stranger Things, which you specifically called out, don’t get made overnight.
I’m on both but I share Hulu with like 10 people and only 3 screens can watch at one time so it’s a clusterfuck. The Hulu one does sound more interesting though since they got the founder for an interview.
I’m subscribed to both and love learning about this shitshow of modern capitalism, so I’ll definitely watch both.
I have both…and I think they are both good…ETA: And yeah, I’ll watch both documentaries with popcorn and schadenfreude… the only vices I have left…
Most people I know are subscribed to both
I must be well outside the popular zeitgeist because I literally had no idea of what a “Fyre Festival” was until this article made me go look it up. Now I can’t wait for a documentary about it.
LOL u missed it it was awesom dude teh LAIDEEZ!!!!
With all the hype these documentaries are generating I think it’s the perfect time to start planning Fyre Fest 2.
This time they’re going to host Fyre Festival on a luxury cruise liner. An unsinkable one!
And this time they get hunted.
Only this time the ANIMALS have the guns!
Fyre Fe2t
I just mainlined this doc, and – well, saying I “had a great time” doesn’t feel appropriate considering the relative solemnity with which Furst and Nason handle their subject, but it certainly captured everything I was interested in and more about a topic that fascinates me.Plus there’s a nice little jab/rug-pull in the closing wrap-up about the Netflix doc being coproduced by the social media company that ran Fyre’s Instagram profile – which should be a warning sign if for no other reason than because they got their start with a meme-reposting account called “Fuckjerry”… I mean, you can go on the imdb page and see their names right there, it’s a Jerry Media project. Based on the trailer for that one it seemed like a less interesting take on the material to me anyway; I was always less interested in the rich-millenial schadenfreude angle than the startup-grifter-hubris schadenfreude, and Netflix seems to be going for the former.(Which isn’t to say I won’t probably still watch it, if just for comparison purposes.)
Plus there’s a nice little jab/rug-pull in the closing wrap-up about the Netflix doc being coproduced by the social media company that ran Fyre’s Instagram profile – which should be a warning sign if for no other reason than because they got their start with a meme-reposting account called “Fuckjerry”… I mean, you can go on the imdb page and see their names right there, it’s a Jerry Media project.TBH, I’m not sure why this matters. I’d be shocked if they were in on the con, and if anything, the fact it sold out as quickly as it did is quite the endorsement for their social media savvy. I don’t see their interest in co-producing the documentary being anything beyond simply more publicity for them.
the festival was a scam to make money off all the future documentaries made about the scam.brilliant!
I want a reality show that’s part Fyre Festival, part Naked & Afraid, and part Lost. I know it’d never happen legally and if it did it’d be scripted heavily. But the thought of dropping off unsuspecting/unprepared contestants on some island that’s filled with mysterious clues that lead them to supplies and tools all while having to “survive” sounds fun. Of course I may just need to crawl back into my volcano lair and leave society to it’s own whims.
I got 20 minutes into the the documentary and stopped. Its a joke.
Heres the TL/DR Version:A con man exploited dumb Social media obsessed millennials.
It gets much better once it gets past the tired “lol millenials are entitled pricks”. Once it stops with the painfully bad and trite commentary, it really is all about the severe amount of fraud that was going on here, and how everything fell apart.
Maybe I’ll come back to it. But what we can take from this is that people should not obsess over some famous assholes on the internet.
This is just like when I had Disney’s Aladdin for SNES but wished I could play the entirely different Genesis game called Disney’s Aladdin.
This seems like the more interesting take on the topic than the Netflix one to me. Reading about it at the time, there was a “how could this happen?” quality to the whole shitshow, but the more you think about it, the more you can see exactly how it could happen: with the complicity of pop-culture figures perfectly willing to shill for something they knew nothing about for a buck, aided by a culture of conspicuous consumption, and bankrolled by investors who still believe in the concept of easy money.
McFarland’s staggering ambition metastasized in a petri dish of late-stage capitalism, corporate greed, and predatory branding, all weaponized by our fear of missing outAnd speaking of, make sure to subscribe to our proprietary subscription service for this documentary!
If you can get past the early sneering contempt the makers seem to have for Millenials (aka tens to hundreds of millions of people) and how that unfortunately tends to frame the festival attendees’ defraudment and being placed in a potentially massively hazardous situation while the world laughed at them for being victims……which, uh, might not be easy……it’s actually a fascinating documentary that really doesn’t pull its punches with the assholes behind the fraud. Don’t let the early sympathetic portrayal of McFarland deceive you, it goes for the fucking throat by the end of it.And, it drops one hell of a bomb: The company that advertised the shit out of Fyre? They’re the ones making Netflix’s doc…
I think I might actually stick with the Hulu doc. Apparently the Netflix one was produced by Fuck Jerry Media or whatever who did the promotion for the event so they’ve got their hands in the cookie jar as much as anyone else. They clearly want us to empathize with the “influencers” who were stranded in this disaster but I was laughin’.
Eat the rich.
Interesting doc … It seems the “reason” for getting the Hulu doc out early is in the final sequence where the ex-Jerry Media employee is conveying how they are complicit in the whole scam; and then mentions he hears they are producing their own documentary to tell their side of the story (which I assume is the Netflix doc) that would presumably be used to absolve them from responsibility.
I absolutely love the power move that Hulu pulled by releasing this before the Netflix one. Also, this doesn’t bode well for the FuckJerry version seeing as Furst and Nelson (with the help of Oren Aks) outline the significant involvement they had leading up to the festival. I feel myself coming away from that doc not nearly as satisfied as the Hulu one.
Any more pathetic and you’d be an ex bought out entity of a revenge porn sight run by Telemundo. I mean for like 8 weeks max, the runway is over after that.