In this year's least surprising news, Fyre Festival 2 has been postponed
To absolutely no one's surprise at all, Fyre Festival 2, the upcoming Mexican festival promoted by convicted fraudster Billy McFarland, has reportedly been postponed for a second time.
The festival – the sequel to the disastrous 2017 event that spawned two documentaries, Hulu's Fyre Fraud and Netflix's Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened – was originally scheduled to take place in 2023
According to ABC News, ticket holders daft enough to part with up to $25,000 for admission have now received an email reading, "The event has been postponed and a new date will be announced. We have issued you a refund. Once the new date is announced, at that time, you can repurchase if it works for your schedule.'
The news comes a week after the proposed host city, Playa del Carmen, denied all knowledge of the event in an official statement.
The statement read: "Regarding the information that has begun to circulate about a supposed event called 'Fyre 2', the municipal government of Playa del Carmen informs that no event of that name will be held in our city.
"After a responsible review of the situation, it is confirmed that there are no records, plans, or conditions that indicate the holding of such an event in the municipality.
"This municipal government is acting responsibly and with commitment, always prioritising public order, safety, and social harmony.
In response, McFarland posted, "Fyre has been working directly with the government of Playa del Carmen (PDC) and their officials since March 5, 2025 to ensure a safe and successful event. All media reports suggesting our team has not been working with the government of PDC are simply inaccurate and based on misinformation."
Fyre 2 was scheduled to take place from 30 May to 2 June 2025, with tickets on sale for $1400 to $25,000. At the time of writing, tickets are still listed as available for purchase on the festival's website.
The original Fyre Festival, scheduled to be held in the Bahamas in 2017, swiftly descended into chaos and ended with zero artists performing, panicked guests fighting over lodgings and food scraps, festival producer Andy King being encouraged to perform fellatio to obtain water and promoter McFarland sentenced to six years in jail after defrauding investors of $27.4 million.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
New York Post
31 minutes ago
- New York Post
Illegal migrant wanted by ICE after allegedly killing Louisiana man mowing his lawn in drunken crash
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement is moving to detain an illegal migrant accused of killing a Louisiana man who was mowing his lawn when the Mexican national's car allegedly ran him over in a drunken crash. Roberto Romero-Hernandez, 34, was hit with a federal arrest detainer after being thrown behind bars and charged with vehicular homicide and driving while intoxicated in the Aug. 3 death of 59-year-old Rickey Maddox, according to the Department of Homeland Security. The feds said they acted immediately to ensure the plastered alien — who was also driving without a license or valid plates — wouldn't walk free following any local proceedings. 'This criminal illegal alien's reckless decision to drink and drive killed an innocent man,' Assistant DHS Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement. Mexican national Roberto Romero-Hernandez, 34, is wanted by ICE after allegedly driving drunk and killing a man. DHS 'The senseless tragedy should have never happened because Romero-Hernandez should have never been in our country… Every death caused by an illegal alien is preventable.' Romero-Hernandez was driving his 2014 Chevrolet Silverado north on Louisiana Highway 1 in Avoyelles Parish around 9 p.m. when he veered off the road and slammed into Maddox, who was riding his Kubota mower on the shoulder, according to Louisiana State Police. The Alexandria resident was taken to a nearby hospital with life-threatening injuries and was later pronounced dead. Roberto-Hernandez, who walked away from the crash unscathed, was cuffed hours later and booked at the Avoyelles Parish Detention Center. Police said he was also charged with careless operation, not having a driver's license and having expired plates. Jail records show he is still locked up. It remains unknown when and where Romero-Hernandez entered the country.
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
The Real Reason Disney Is Killing Hulu
Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Approximately two months ago, Disney closed a deal with Comcast, the parent company of NBCUniversal, that sealed Hulu's fate. The House of Mouse owned a majority stake in the junior streamer, but Comcast retained a 33 percent share, and Disney had been itching for full control over the app for years. By June, the two corporate giants had finally ironed out an agreement whereby Disney bought out NBCUniversal's remaining stake in Hulu, working the books so as to underpay its entertainment rival and reap a multibillion-dollar tax benefit in the process. But the more pressing goal behind that transaction became clear this week, when Disney CEO Bob Iger announced on an earnings call that his company will phase out Hulu's individual app and 'fully integrate' it into the Disney+ platform, centralizing both services around one ad server. Hulu is getting buried, but it's not dead yet. Going into next year, viewers will retain the choice of picking only a Hulu subscription or a Disney+ subscription—although, no matter what, they'll have to access one or the other through Disney+ itself. Meanwhile, the plan to merge Hulu With Live TV, specifically, with Fubo (the once indie live-sports streamer that's now majority owned by Disney) is still in the works, with the latter set to absorb all of the Hulu-cable bundle's branding and rights by next year. In other words: Disney, going forward, is putting its property into the streaming game for the long haul, and it will leave hesitant nonsubscribers with no choice but to tether themselves to Disney. Hulu, for all intents and purposes, will exist only in ghost form. It's kinda like how Amazon is absorbing the entire Freevee streaming service and killing off its individual app—except with much more outcry from the populace, considering how long Hulu has thrived as a far more distinctive brand with plenty of subscribers. There's a noteworthy trend here: Disney is clearly impatient to ensure that its subsidiary brands are, to consumers, automatically synonymous with Mickey Mouse, just as Freevee now is with Amazon. Already, Disney+ users could access many Hulu exclusives through the parent-company-branded app, but Hulu die-hards could not see anything from Disney+ in turn. Fubo is not fully owned by Disney and thus not the docket for full absorption (yet). But the House of Mouse owns enough of the smaller sporting enterprise that it can use it as a testing ground for the greater Hulu phasedown. More pertinent to Disney is that Fubo is a part of its portfolio at all; the small streamer had sued Disney on antitrust grounds after it announced a partnership with Fox and Warner to pool together their resources for a megasize sports platform. Disney's respective 70 percent purchase of Fubo stakes was meant to toss some loose change, make the suit go away, and keep Disney focused on its in-house sports missions. It's all in the family, and it happens to be a big family. This leads us to another industry-shifting announcement Iger made on Wednesday. Just one day before Disney's earnings call, its subsidiary brand ESPN announced that it would be more closely intertwined with the NFL than ever before. America's still-dominant athletic league would get a 10 percent stake in ESPN, and the iconic channel would acquire plenty of properties once owned by the NFL. These include broadcasting rights to RedZone's popular Sunday-afternoon game analyses, a new status for ESPN Fantasy Football as the league's official fantasy offshoot, and total ownership of the NFL Network from the airwaves to the digital streams. Iger also confirmed Wednesday that ESPN's official streaming app will launch in two weeks, bringing all the network's multichannel offerings into a $29.99-a-month subscription. ESPN, which is still too recognizable to suffer the same fate as Hulu, will be centralized into one core streaming product with even more sports than ever before: The House of Mouse is also paying the WWE way more money than Peacock could ever pony up for WrestleMania and Royal Rumble, thus wrenching those live events away from NBCUniversal along with the last bits of Hulu. Now the only other streamer with a compelling wrestling offer is Netflix, which holds the license for the popular livecasts of Monday Night Raw. As if that weren't enough, sporting fans will be highly incentivized to take the new app as well as Disney+ in a bundled package that costs the same as the ESPN streaming app, about $30 a month. It was almost as if Iger and his team foresaw the bearish reactions when they informed investors that Disney's current streaming arrangement wasn't really taking off. There was a broader message from all the added and centralized goodies the company was adding to its digital ecosystem: The House of Mouse, like the rest of the entertainment world, has resigned itself to chasing after Netflix as the competition remains far behind—and, in response, will push its core brand to the top, making it as ubiquitous as possible within the streaming world. It's not a coincidence that Iger also mentioned Wednesday that his company would stop publicly reporting those middling subscription numbers for Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+ from here on out—you know, just like Netflix stopped doing this year. There was once a time when entertainment giants shared their valuable shows and movies with one another, allowing Netflix to stream and distribute certain movies, or sharing the streaming rights to a particular show with a competitor, or teaming up to share a particular sporting league with the entire country. What we're seeing now with these historic TV-and-movie empires is something more territorial, more bloodthirsty: pivots to streaming that are no longer as interoperable with other services, brand synergy that insists upon keeping the parent-company logo in view at all times, and particular niches that may stand out as the virtual kaleidoscope of streaming takes out what's left of the cable-and-broadcast landscape. It's a long game from Disney, and an aggressive one. Such business decisions can be witnessed across the industry: The restoration of the HBO Max brand (fka Max, fka HBO Max) was symbolic of David Zaslav's move to hoard Warner Bros. Discovery's crown jewels. As the company splits back up into two separate firms, Zaslav has focused on three core brands—Warner Bros., HBO, DC Studios—at the expense of everything else. HBO Max's formerly sprawling streaming library has been gutted. The varied 'hubs' that once featured within the app (e.g., Adult Swim, Turner Classic Movies, Sesame Workshop, the NBA) have been purged or sold off. What's left is a narrowed, frumpy prestige app that feels like HBO Now and HBO Go, complemented only by a limited window of BritBox previews. You can also look at Paramount, which closed its controversial (and likely politically motivated) merger with Skydance Media just this week. The game there is also digital. As CNN's Brian Stelter noted, the first memo from the overarching Paramount-Skydance CEO—David Ellison, the son of infamous tech oligarch Larry Ellison—'used the word 'tech' ten times,' with a matching focus on 'Paramount's streaming businesses and upgrading the company's outdated technology systems.' The melding of Showtime's once-individual app with Paramount+ as a 'Premium' was just a precursor. With the new merger, both Paramount+ and Pluto TV are the key streaming businesses, and they'll surely be at the front of Ellison's efforts to make his conglomerate 'a next-generation media and technology leader.' One key indicator as to how this will unfold: exclusive yearslong rights to stream South Park on Paramount+, yanking its dozens of seasons away from HBO Max. (Whether Ellison will keep his hands away from the show's biting criticism of his business remains to be seen.) On top of that, a deal to use his dad's artificial intelligence infrastructure to make Paramount+ a more algorithmically driven streaming platform—in the vein of Netflix. Ellison is simply voicing the transition that's been well underway. Even smaller players understand this now. Is Roku still primarily a maker of streaming hardware and smart-TV software? Nope—it's buoyed by its own streaming services, thanks to its namesake Roku Channel, its acquisition of the Frndly streamer, and its launch of a cheaper paid service known as Howdy. (By the way, much like with Netflix, you should no longer expect Roku to report the subscription counts for any of those.) What's driving Fox Corporation's growth? Per the Murdochs' admission, much of it comes from ad sales for Tubi, an app unique in the fact that it remains totally free; now Fox wants to shore up its own brand synergy with a 'Fox One' app that will stream live Fox TV, Fox Sports, and Fox News (as separated from the Fox Nation service). Why is Lionsgate slumping? Perhaps because it divested from Starz and has yet to replace that brand with a viable in-house streaming component. Netflix, having been first to the party, is still the king. It's the only service that can operate like a free-for-all hoarder, gobbling up whatever it wants and scaling at its own pace, because it was the pioneer that forced the old guard to catch up with its internet-centric model. Other entertainers, far too late to the streaming world or far too generous with sharing their properties, are finally, belatedly shaping up. It's no longer about just offering as much as you can (Max's mistake), granting junior brands any level of autonomy (Disney's and Paramount's and Amazon's and HBO's mistake), underdeveloping the digital experience (Paramount's and Disney's and HBO's mistake), or simply hoping that big libraries will bring in big subscriber numbers and hard dollars (everyone's mistake). It's about ensuring that the territory you do have stays your territory alone, and that it's synonymous with your broader company name. 'We're at a point, given the way we're operating our businesses, where we don't really look at being in the linear business and the streaming business. We're in the television business,' Bob Iger said on Wednesday. Forget it, Hulu—it's Disney+. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Los Angeles Times
4 hours ago
- Los Angeles Times
After 28 years, O.C. man self-deports to Tijuana in search of a better life
For Arturo, the decision to self-deport to Mexico came crashing one morning. He headed to work at a construction site when a drunk driver rear-ended his truck in December, shortly after Christmas. Living out of a motel, the accident left him feeling frustrated about his lot in life as an undocumented Mexican immigrant trying to make ends meet in Orange County. Arturo, 28, who asked TimesOC not to use his last name out of concern for mixed-status family members, considered leaving the United States not long after Donald Trump won the presidential election in November and promised to bring about the 'largest deportation' program in U.S. history. In March, he self-deported from Anaheim to Tijuana alongside his wife and child, both of whom are U.S. citizens, to avoid any chance of family separation amid Trump's immigration crackdown. Turning the Mexican migration narrative of past generations on its head, Arturo also hoped the very same country he left behind 28 years ago could offer something his life in O.C. did not: an escape from poverty. 'The American Dream is dead,' Arturo told TimesOC over Zoom from Tijuana. 'I'm in Mexico now and I'm excited to see if I can build my dreams here.' Before self-deporting, the U.S. was the only country he knew. His family took him across the border from Puebla, Mexico to Santa Ana without authorization as a newborn. Concerned about street gangs, the family moved to Garden Grove, where Arturo spent much of his formative years until a dispute with his mother put him out on the streets at 13, he said. He spent time in juvenile detention — including for a pair of assault with a deadly weapon misdemeanors — that made approval for a legal work permit under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy difficult to obtain. An immigration attorney advised him that a U visa was an option, if Arturo pressed charges against his mother for child abandonment, but that was something he was unwilling to do. Without any adjustment to his status, Arturo bounced around working odd jobs under the table or with fake Social Security numbers, paying into a system he didn't stand to benefit from in the future. Housing remained a struggle for the past three or so years with him and his wife alternately living out of a car, motels, rented rooms and a studio apartment. They last rented a room in Anaheim off Beach Boulevard near Stanton. 'My room, in particular, was just a gateway for mice,' Arturo said. Like other Californians struggling with the cost of living, the couple contemplated moving out of state before crossing the border. Arizona looked like an affordable option, but California's status as a 'sanctuary' state for undocumented immigrants kept them from leaving. That sense of security eroded with news about the infamous Terrorism Confinement Center, commonly called CECOT, in El Salvador, where migrants removed by the U.S. government were being detained without due process. Fearing what could come next, the family headed south to the San Ysidro crossing with $2,000 in tow to start life over in Tijuana. 'I had a free week before I left,' Arturo said. 'I grew up by Little Saigon. I love my pho. I went to Pho 79 in Garden Grove. There's a pho restaurant down the street in Tijuana, but I'm scared to try it.' He couldn't get his truck across the border and left it in a paid parking lot for a relative to retrieve. The family crossed over by foot. Arturo and his family carried a backpack, duffle bag and a diaper bag while storing everything else they owned in a stateside storage unit. 'You know you can't come back,' a Mexican border official warned. Arturo acknowledged the warning, crossed into Mexico and checked into a hotel. Self-deportation is not a new concept, but it is something undocumented immigrants are grappling with more during the Trump administration. In 2008, U.S. Immigrant and Customs Enforcement piloted 'Operation Scheduled Departure' and ran ads in Spanish encouraging undocumented immigrants without criminal records who had otherwise ignored deportation orders to report to an ICE field office for voluntary removal. Santa Ana was one of five cities targeted under the pilot program. But only two immigrants living in the city self-deported before the pilot ended weeks later. Former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney made self-deportation a plank of his immigration policies but faced ridicule for the stance during his failed 2012 campaign. President Trump's visible immigration raids, coupled with pulling back on protected areas like churches and schools as possible avenues of enforcement, has ratcheted up the pressure for immigrants to self-deport like never before. On May 5, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security launched a self-deportation incentive that offers $1,000 in travel assistance. More recently, the Trump administration has urged DACA recipients to self-deport despite the deferral on deportation the program offers. Leo Chavez, a UC Irvine professor emeritus of anthropology and author of 'The Latino Threat: How Alarmist Rhetoric Misrepresents Immigrants, Citizens, and the Nation,' researched the impact of xenophobic messaging and statistically found elevated stress levels in immigrants. 'The policies and rhetoric are so severe now that some people are saying they've had enough,' he said of the current self-deportation trend. 'Some people would like to escape the onslaught of this rhetoric on their lives. There is a certain amount of liberation from not being blamed for everything.' Chavez also noted that young Mexicans considering self-deportation would encounter a different country than the one their parents left behind. 'Young people are able to find jobs,' he said. 'The Mexican economy is doing relatively well. That migrant push out of Mexico to the U.S. has gone down in the last two or three decades.' But this costs the community — in the form of family separation — and has many undocumented immigrants in the U.S. still taking a hunkered down approach, Chavez added. Arturo has described the experience of being Mexican in Mexico as a 'peace' he has not felt before. The appearance of masked and armed federal immigration agents arresting undocumented immigrants this summer throughout Southern California sent a chill through local immigrant economies with some workers either staying home in fear or risking arrest while laboring at car washes or selling food on the street. Arturo felt like he 'dodged a bullet' by self-deporting as he watched the news unfold from the safety of the 3-bedroom apartment he now rents in Tijuana. He does admit to feeling a bit of survivor's guilt. But Arturo has been more preoccupied with getting established in Tijuana. For the first few months, his life somewhat resembled the one he left behind. He was able to get a tax identification number but needed to wait for three months before the Mexican government issued him a voter identification card, which allows him to vote in elections and is a valid form of identification accepted by employers. Arturo used his passport in the meantime to secure odd jobs, from security to landscaping. But as a self-described 'no sabo' kid, his lack of proficiency in Spanish cost him one job. Nearly six months into self-deportation, Arturo, as of late July, was working at a call center. He pays the equivalent of $500 a month for his family's Tijuana apartment. At his wife's insistence, he chronicles his self-deportation journey on social media, from a tour of his apartment to answering a slew of questions from a growing base of intrigued followers. Arturo doesn't claim to romanticize self-deportation and notes that everyone's situation is different. He didn't have family in Mexico depending on remittances like other immigrant workers in the U.S. The decision to leave came down to his own family and their future. 'I've shown that you can come here to make a life,' Arturo said. 'If it's a viable option for others, I would tell them to come to Mexico, too.'
