Fyre Festival documentary released by Hulu, three days before Netflix version about disastrous event

Hulu has surprise released its documentary about the disastrous Fyre Festival, just days before Netflix were scheduled to release their own film about the disastrous event.

Both streaming services had been working on documentaries that looked to cover the events that led up to the chaotic festival, as well as how the organisers defrauded investors and attendees.

Hulu’s programme, Fyre Fraud, has been labelled a “true crime comedy” and includes interviews with whistleblowers, ticket-holders and festival co-founder Billy McFarland, who has since been convicted of fraud and sentenced to six years in prison.

In a statement, directors Jenner Furst and Julia Willoughby Nelson said that McFarland “offers us a window into the mind of a con artist, the insiduous charm of the fraudster and how they can capture our imaginations, our investment and our votes in the age of Trump”.

They added that McFarland’s staggering ambition “metastasized in a petri dish of latestage capitalism, corporate greed and predatory branding, all weaponised by our fear of missing out”.

Netflix’s documentary also examines how the charismatic McFarland managed to recruit some of Instagram’s most famous faces, from Kendall Jenner to Bella Hadid and Emily Ratajkowski.

Directed by Chris Smith, Fyre shows how thousands of entitled young people paid extortionate amounts to see Blink-182 on a luxury island, only to arrive to find their accommodation was a disaster relief tent, and the high-class cuisine they were promised was replaced by a slice of cheese on dry bread in a styrofoam container.

Fyre is available on Netflix from 18 January.