Hulu Releases Fyre Festival Documentary 4 Days Before Netflix's Own Doc

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.

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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.

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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

11 Best Documentaries of 2018, From 'Minding the Gap' to 'Monrovia, Indiana' (Photos)

Documentaries managed to find an even broader audience this year, with streaming services like Netflix and Hulu doubling down on non-fiction, both as producers and distributors of new unscripted films and TV shows. But whether they screened in theaters, at home or at film festivals, these documentaries were the best of the best:
Focus Features/Hulu/Netflix
10. “Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood”:

Matt Tyrnauer’s portrait of legendary Tinseltown “procurer” Scotty Bowers had plenty of vintage show-biz dish, but it also raised interesting questions about who decides when and how LGBTQ history is “appropriate” to share with the masses.
Greenwich Entertainment
9. “Hale County This Morning, This Evening”:

Equal parts visual poem and ethnographic documentary, RaMell Ross’ debut film examines a handful of residents of the titular Alabama county as his camera turns quotidian moments into something breathtaking and magical.
Louverture Films
8. “Bathtubs Over Broadway”:

Besides providing a fascinating glimpse into the industrial musical -- elaborate song-and-dance extravaganzas mounted by companies like Xerox or Purina to excite their sales teams -- this film follows one collector’s journey from snarky outside observer to fan, champion, and archivist.
Focus World
7. “Monrovia, Indiana”:

Frederick Wiseman, arguably our greatest living documentarian, takes his camera to the Midwest and reveals more truths about the American heartland than a dozen New York Times let’s-talk-to-Trump’s-base think-pieces.
Zipporah Films
6. “That Way Madness Lies”:

Sandra Luckow’s portrait of her brother Duanne’s battles with mental health issues -- and the impact they have had on their entire family -- feels almost painfully intimate at times, focusing on the helplessness that people can feel as they watch a loved one disappear into disorder and exposing the shortcomings of the public health system to deal with such crises.
First Run Features
5. “Jane Fonda in Five Acts”:

The on-screen and off-screen life of this iconic actress and activist sweeps through a fascinating chunk of modern American history in this compelling documentary from director Susan Lacy (working with the blueprint laid out by Fonda’s 2006 memoir).
HBO
4. “Three Identical Strangers”:

The tale of triplets separated at birth and reunited as adults is a fascinating enough story, but it’s just the first act of a family saga so bizarre and tragic that no novelist could ever invent it. Tim Wardle recounts this yarn with grace.
Neon
3. (tie) “They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead”/ “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?”:

The great Morgan Neville (“20 Feet From Stardom,” “Best of Enemies”) scored two of the year’s best docs with looks at two exceedingly different cultural figures: the cantankerous Orson Welles and the thoroughly kind and empathetic Fred Rogers.
Focus Features/Netflix
2. “Shirkers”:

Sandi Tan retraces the path to her own lost indie feature film from decades ago, discovering uncomfortable truths about her collaborators and herself along the way. She pulls no punches as she confronts both her own work and her own past.
Netflix
1. “Minding the Gap”:

Bing Liu turns the camera on himself and his lifelong friends (all avid skateboarders) to uncover the pain in their childhoods and to explore new directions toward healing themselves and each other as adults. It’s an emotional knockout that offers a much-needed jolt of hope.
Hulu

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TheWrap’s Best & Worst of 2018: Critic Alonso Duralde picks the best non-fiction films that span a gamut of styles and stories

Documentaries managed to find an even broader audience this year, with streaming services like Netflix and Hulu doubling down on non-fiction, both as producers and distributors of new unscripted films and TV shows. But whether they screened in theaters, at home or at film festivals, these documentaries were the best of the best:

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11 Best Documentaries of 2018, From 'Minding the Gap' to 'Monrovia, Indiana' (Photos)

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