Years after the disastrous 2017 Fyre Festival, Billy McFarland has announced that Fyre Festival II is in the works.
McFarland said in a video posted on social media Sunday that after speaking with “people as far away as the Middle East and South America” to host the festival, he ultimately decided that the festival would be “coming back to the Caribbean” with a target date at the end of 2024. Specific locations, dates and festival lineup have yet to be revealed.
“This is a big day,” he added in the clip. “It has been the absolute wildest journey to get here, and it really all started during a seventh-month stint in solitary confinement. I wrote out this 50-page plan of how it would take this overall interest and demand in Fyre and how it would take my ability to bring people from around the world together to make the impossible happen.
On Tuesday morning, McFarland wrote on X (formerly known as Twitter) that presale tickets had sold out. According to the festival’s website, ticket prices range from $499 to $7,999.
In Sunday’s video, McFarland also acknowledged two previously announced projects that are in development, including the documentary After the Fyre, which has been in the works with Ample Entertainment and Fremantle, and a Broadway musical based on the festival.
In 2018, McFarland was sentenced to six years in prison after admitting to defrauding investors in the festival as well as pleading guilty to charges in a ticket-selling scam. The ill-fated Fyre Festival was initially launched by McFarland and rapper Ja Rule in 2017. It was promoted by A-list celebrities as a luxury music event but once ticket-holders arrived to the festival in The Bahamas, they were met with a much different reality. The festival ended in a disaster with attendees taking to social media at the time and showing the issues surrounding on-site accommodations, security and food.
In May 2022, McFarland was released from prison to a halfway house in New York. McFarland’s attorney Jason Russo said at the time that his client’s focus was on “the best way to generate income to pay this restitution back and make amends.”
Later last year, McFarland also apologized for his role in the festival. “I let people down,” he said on Good Morning America in November 2022. “I let down employees. I let down their families. I let down investors. So I need to apologize. I’m wrong and it’s bad.”
Following the festival’s public fiasco, it was later the subject of two documentaries in 2019, including Netflix’s FYRE: The Greatest Party That Never Happened and Hulu’s Fyre Fraud. But both projects were met with skepticism when a story in The Ringer revealed that Hulu’s project paid McFarland for an appearance and to license materials, and Netflix’s doc was co-produced by Jerry Media and Matte Projects, which were involved in the festival.
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