Hulu is fighting “Fyre” with Fyre. Hulu has one-upped Netflix, dropping their own competing documentary about the Fyre Festival just four days before Netflix had announced they would release their own.
Now available for streaming now on Hulu, “Fyre Fraud” contains an exclusive interview with the convicted creator of Fyre Fest, Billy McFarland. But streaming on Friday will be “Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened,” which comes from the director of “Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond,” Chris Smith.
Both documentaries describe the failed 2017 music festival organized by McFarland and rapper Ja Rule that turned into an internet sensation and a subsequent criminal case. The festival on a remote, private island was hyped by social media influencers and celebrities as a lavish, exclusive event, but attendees who had spent thousands of dollars found themselves virtually stranded in woefully inadequate conditions.
Hulu had previously announced “Fyre Fraud” as a planned series, featuring a tell-all interview with McFarland, who plead guilty to wire fraud in Feb. 2018 and to two counts of fraud in March 2018.
“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,” directors Jenner Furst and Julia Willoughby Nason said in a statement. “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. Our aim was to set the stage for a strange journey into the moral abyss of our digital age, going beyond the meme to show an ecosystem of enablers, driven by profit and willing to look the other way, for their own gain.”
Smith on the other hand spoke with other organizers and produced it with VICE Studios as well as Library Films, Jerry Media and Matte Projects.
Watch the trailer for both projects below. “Fyre Fraud” is streaming now on Hulu, and “Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened” will be on Netflix on Friday, Jan. 18.
https://youtu.be/ljkaq_he-BU