Maybe when all the craziness went down back in April 2017, you had no idea what Fyre Festival was. Like, did they accidentally misspell fire? Did a musical festival catch on fire? (No joke, that's what my cousin thought). Or, maybe you did know a bunch of social media influencers and extremely affluent millennials boarded a plan to the Bahamas for the most luxurious musical festival of all time — and it did not go as planned. Either way, there is no doubt most people know exactly what it is now thanks to two new documentaries that dropped just days apart from each other — Netflix's "Fyre" and Hulu's "Fyre Fraud."
These documentaries took the Internet by storm, causing onlookers of this catastrophe to no longer debate if these rich millennials deserved this disaster after spending upwards of $250k on a music festival they knew next-to-nothing about to arguing about which streaming service put out the better story of this nightmare. Here's my personal opinion, after watching both...
Netflix's "Fyre"
Ah, Netflix's documentary — my personal favorite, but it was definitely a close call. Let's start with the big negative: Jerry Media, who handled a huge chunk of the fraudulent festival's marketing, played a major part in creating this project. Needless to say, it makes you question the film's objectivity. However, thanks to Jerry Media, Netflix's documentary has a lot of behind-the-scenes footage that Hulu's was missing. That's my number one reason for picking Netflix; the footage was definitely intriguing and a good insight into what really happened. They also had a lot of great interviews from people who worked right alongside the infamous Billy McFarland — some who begged him daily to stop the event before things turned out irrecoverably bad and others who would have done anything to make the show go on for McFarland.
They even interviewed the famous Maryanne, an innocent Bahamian who has gone viral because she was forced to use her savings to pay her employees after McFarland bailed. Overall, Netflix's "Fyre" really focuses on the failed festival, from beginning to end, and the multiple people who were actively involved in its creation.
Hulu's "Fyre Fraud"
Hulu's documentary was very different from Netflix's, but it still satisfies the "Fyre" for documentaries that millennials seem to have. The best part of "Fyre Fraud" was that they sat down for an exclusive interview with McFarland himself — and man, did they roast him! From calling him a compulsive liar to a sociopath, Hulu didn't hold back when it came to calling him out for his actions. They also looked more at McFarland and his life before Fyre Festival, focusing just as much on his first company — Magnises — as they did on the festival. They even invested time into looking at his fraudulent, post-Fyre Festival endeavor called NYC Access. Throughout it all, they even incorporated memes and popular television/movie clips to help make their documentary much more "millennial-focused." Overall, it meshed together really well and almost seemed to play as a psychological examination of McFarland, in my opinion, than just an analyzation of how a music festival could have gone so horribly wrong.
All in all, Fyre Festival was an absolutely airheaded farce — both films portray that. Hulu just focuses more on Fyre Festival's evil mastermind, Billy McFarland, whereas Netflix focuses on the festival itself. So who did you think had the more Fyre documentary — Netflix or Hulu?
