Founded by CEO of Fyre Media Inc, Billy McFarland and rapper, Ja Rule, the fraudulent luxury music festival was created with the intent of promoting the company's Fyre app for booking music talent. The festival was scheduled to take place on April 28–30 and May 5–7, 2017, on the Bahamian island of Great Exuma. The event was promoted on Instagram by social media influencers including Kendall Jenner, Bella Hadid, Hailey Baldwin and Emily Ratajkowski, many of whom did not initially disclose they had been paid to do so. During the Fyre Festival's inaugural weekend, the event experienced problems related to security, food, accommodation, medical services and artist relations, resulting in the festival being postponed indefinitely - and eventually cancelled. Instead of the luxury villas and gourmet meals for which festival attendees paid hundreds of dollars, they received prepackaged sandwiches and FEMA tents as their accommodation. In March 2018, McFarland pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud to defraud investors and ticket holders, and a second count to defraud a ticket vendor that occurred while out on bail. In October 2018, McFarland was sentenced to six years in prison and ordered to forfeit US$26 million. The organizers became the subject of at least eight lawsuits, several seeking class action status, and one seeking more than $100 million in damages. The cases accuse the organizers of defrauding ticket buyers.
The film goes further by tracing Fyre Festival's dirty-money trail, and perhaps more importantly, pulls back the curtain on the making. Informative and refreshing documentary showing a more serious side of what happened with the infamous festival that never came to be. The film convincingly identifies the fraud-fest as just one more chimera of modern times, a 24-hour game of "let's pretend," in which one cannot tell if someone is a delusional liar or the smartest person in the room. It's interesting to hear the madness explained, but Netflix's documentary zooms out to contextualize Fyre Festival as a symptom of a much greater issue. The Netflix documentary gets into some of the larger ramifications of Fyre Festival, but the glib tone undermines the seriousness of the situation. McFarland, like most scammers, is a wellspring of genius misused for perilous ends. Fyre Fraud is a story of an all-time swindle. However, the film hoists McFarland up as a straw man indictment against millennials, casting aside a thorough examination of the festival in favor of cheap laughs. Trying to use pop culture as shorthand can be helpful, but in this case, it turns the issues into actual cartoon characters. If you love a story of absolute, no-holds-barred, extravagant disaster, you'll probably want to watch both. But if you just want a better idea of what the heck happened here, the truth is that either film will serve.
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