'Fyre Fraud' Trailer: Hulu Beats Netflix To The Punch With Their Own Fyre Festival Documentary

Is this the beginning of a streaming war? In what can only be considered a shot across the bow of Netflix, Hulu has dropped their own secret Fyre Festival documentary five days before Netflix releases a doc of their own. And this is no simple case of two different movies telling the same story. The Hulu doc Fyre Fraud not only has a head-start on Netflix's Fyre, it also has several key factors that set it apart from its competitor.

For one thing, Fyre Fraud is the only one of the two docs to feature an interview with Fyre Festival founder and con-man Billy McFarland. For another, Netflix's Fyre is executive produced by Elliot Tebele, the founder of FuckJerry, an Instagram account-turned-marketing agency that helped market the Fyre Festival, and was allegedly well-aware that the festival was going to be an absolute disaster, but went ahead with the plan to sell it to unwitting rubes anyway. One might argue that makes Netflix's doc potentially biased, but that's up to the viewer to decide.

Here's the Fyre Fraud synopsis:

The Fyre Festival was the defining scam of the millennial generation, at the nexus of social media influence, late-stage capitalism, and morality in the post-truth era. Marketing for the 2017 music event went viral with the help of rapper Ja Rule, instagram stars, and models, but turned epic fail after stranding thousands in the Bahamas. Featuring an exclusive interview with Billy McFarland, the convicted con-man behind the festival; FYRE FRAUD is a true-crime comedy bolstered by a cast of whistleblowers, victims, and insiders going beyond the spectacle to uncover the power of FOMO and an ecosystem of enablers, driven by profit and a lack of accountability in the digital age.

Regarding the new Huly documentary, directors Jenner Furst and Julia Willoughby Nason released the following statement:

FYRE FRAUD is more than the story of a failed music festival in the Bahamas – this dark comedy is a cautionary tale for a generation.

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. 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.

We draw on countless cultural references, on true crime tension, and on humor – but we did not intend to create a toothless comedy about the Fyre Festival. We hope this film can pierce our collective apathy and disrupt our own millennial peers, if only for an instant – to look at these stories for what they truly are, and to halt this algorithm before it devours us whole.

Fyre Fraud is now streaming on Hulu. Netflix's Fyre will be released January 18, 2019.