Fyre (film)


Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened is a 2019 American documentary film about Billy McFarland and the failed Fyre Festival of 2017. It was directed by Chris Smith, and was released on Netflix on January 18, 2019.
The film was co-produced by Jerry Media, the social media agency responsible for promoting the Fyre Festival and covering up the fraud, and MATTE Projects, the production company that directed the Fyre Festival's promotional shoot. Jerry Media approached VICE with the idea of a documentary three months after the events. According to Netflix, the documentary was Smith's idea.

Reception

On the review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds a 90% approval rating with an average rating of 7.54/10, based on 73 reviews. The website's critical consensus reads, "Fyre smolders with agonizing tension when a party in paradise goes awry, but this slickly assembled documentary reserves its greatest horror for damning observations about the dangers of wealth." Metacritic, which uses a normalized average, assigned the film a score of 75 out of 100, based on 26 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".
In reviewing Fyre and Fyre Fraud, a similar documentary that premiered on Hulu, The A.V. Club stated that "Fyre is the stronger, more worthwhile documentary, but its counterpart is a helpful reminder that, like so many stories, one account can't contain the whole truth."
In April 2019, Netflix reported that 20 million households had watched the film during its first month of release.