Netflix’s ‘Fyre: The Greatest Party that Never Happened’, and Hulu’s ‘Fyre Fraud’, are two newly released documentaries about the failed music festival ‘Fyre’, which was scheduled to take place in 2017, but never happened.

Founders Billy McFarland, and his partner, the rapper Ja Rule, intended the Fyre Festival to be a high-end, luxury experience, with the attendees flying to Great Exuma, a private island in the Bahamas for the party. They guests were promised amenities such as stay in luxury beachside villas, catered gourmet food, and the chance to watch performances by Major Lazer, Blink-182, Migos, amongst many other acts and surprise guests. 

The festival was advertised as ‘two weekends in paradise”, with the ticket prices ranging from $450 to $12,000 each. The event was further promoted on social media platforms such as Instagram by famous socialites and models including Kendall Jenner, Hailey Baldwin, Emily Ratajkowski and Bella Hadid.

Not long after arriving, the festival-goers discovered that the whole event to be a scam. They were made to collect their luggage from a shipping container in the middle of the night, and were provided tents and pre-packaged sandwiches instead of the villas and gourmet food that they had paid for. In addition to these problems, the guests were stranded at the airport for hours as flights were either delayed or cancelled.

In the aftermath of this disastrous event, co-founder Billy McFarland, was sentenced to six years in prison after pleading guilty to wire fraud.

Streaming platforms Netflix and Hulu both took interest in the subject and released documentaries based on the same.

 The Netflix documentary ‘Fyre: The Greatest Party that Never Happened’ gives us more an explanatory and up-close look at the failed festival. It also provides deeper insight into how McFarland’s actions impacted other people, more specifically the hundreds of local Bahamian workers who were employed and then abandoned without pay.

On the other hand, Hulu’s ‘Fyre Fraud’, takes a more analytical approach to the failed festival by placing it within the cultural context, alongside our obsession with social media. In addition, it includes an interview with co-founder Billy McFarland. However, it proved to be less insightful in comparison to the Netflix documentary. Further, Hulu’s ‘Fyre Fraud’ accused Jerry Media (one of the companies behind the promotion of the festival) of promoting the festival despite knowing months in advance that it would fail.

In response to this, Netflix released a statement, “We were happy to work with Jerry Media and a number of others on the film. At no time did they, or any others we worked with, request favourable coverage in our film, which would be against our ethics. We stand behind our film, believe it is an unbiased and illuminating look at what happened, and look forward to sharing it with audiences around the world.”

Both documentaries, ‘Fyre: The Greatest Party that Never Happened’ and ‘Fyre Fraud’ are available to stream on Netflix and Hulu respectively.