The Fyre Festival is a gift that keeps on giving for video streaming services, as Netflix today announced a documentary about the disastrous 2017 festival, which collapsed before it even started and landed its organizer, Billy McFarland, a six-year prison sentence.
“Fyre” will be directed by Chris Smith, who helmed last year’s documentary “Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond,” and “gives a first-hand look into the disastrous crash of Fyre as told by the organizers themselves,” according to the announcement. The doc will be released on January 18 and is produced by Vice Studios, Library Films, and Jerry Media. Watch a teaser video below; a proper trailer is expected in the coming days.
30WEST negotiated the deal with Netflix on behalf of the filmmakers.
Earlier this year Hulu announced a docusieres on the festival that does not yet have a release date, and last year Seth Rogen and the Lonely Island said they were planning a film that follows a storyline similar to that of the Fyre Festival.
McFarland, 26, was sentenced to six years in prison in October. The heavily hyped Fyre Festival was to be a “luxury concert” — taking place on a small island in the Bahamas and featuring Blink-182, Migos and Disclosure — but collapsed on in a mess of disorganization on April 29 before it had even started. Far from the luxury accommodations and celebrity-chef-prepared meals promised by its producers —McFarland and rapper Ja Rule — concertgoers were met with flimsy tents, boxed lunches, near-total disorganization and long waits for flights to return to the mainland after airlines began refusing to fly would-be concertgoers to the overcrowded island of Exumas.
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One production professional briefly associated with the festival told Variety the event was marked by “incompetence on an almost inconceivable scale.”