AEW’s Fyter Fest was the company’s second-ever event after the inaugural PPV, Double or Nothing 2019. A month after the historic first pay per view, AEW announced a bizarrely titled Fyter Fest event just a month later. Fyter Fest was bizarrely titled because it was a parody of the infamous disastrous music festival, Fyre Festival. AEW parodied the name, logo, and slogan of the Fyre Festival, with Fyter Fest being advertised as the “The Most Luxurious Gaming & Wrestling Festival of All Time!”Fyter FestRELATED: AEW Fyter Fest 2019: Recap, Results, & Spoilers

The Real Fyre Festival Was A Notorious Disaster

For those that don’t know, Fyre Festival was a fraudulent luxury music festival that took place in 2017. The event was founded by conman Billy McFarland and rapper Ja Rule, and they made huge promises that Fyre would be one of the greatest music festivals of all time. The event had huge social media marketing and was heavily promoted on Instagram by social media influencers and models including Kendall Jenner, Bella Hadid, Hailey Baldwin, and Emily Ratajkowski.

Fyre Festival

With huge promises and major hyper surrounding Fyre Festival, the event turned out to be a complete disaster, with major problems across the board. Attendees had paid thousands to attend the event on Pablo Escobar’s private island, expecting luxury villas and gourmet food but what they got instead were prepacked food and FEMA tents. The whole event had problems with food, security, accommodation, medical services, music acts as well as a plethora of other problems.

The founder of the event Billy McFarland pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud to defraud investors and ticket holders, and a second count to defraud a ticket vendor that occurred while out on bail, he was sentenced to six years in prison and ordered to forfeit $26 million. Other organizers of the event became the subject of at least eight lawsuits, several seeking class-action status, and one seeking more than $100 million in damages.

There were numerous documentaries on the event, it was a complete disaster show.

So why on earth did AEW choose this of all things to be the focus of just their second event as a burgeoning promotion?

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Fyter Fest Was A Parody Of Fyre Festival

The first Fyter Fest took place on June 29, 2019, and in the lead-up to the event, AEW talent parodied the infamous Fyre Festival. Under heavy rainfall on the day, Kenny Omega and other AEW talent joked about the event possibly not going ahead. Showing heavy rainfall outside, Omega posted a video on Twitter talking about how Fyter Fest will go on despite losing a bunch of tents, their plumping caving in, and the main roads to the venue being cut off.

Adam Page got in on the joke, posting on Twitter, “Just got to Fyter Fest. It’s pandemonium. There’s absolutely no space in these ‘locker rooms’ and people are fighting over toilet paper.” Nyla Rose commented, “I’m thirsty as hell and there’s literally NO water at #FyterFest…and honestly I’m afraid to ask at this point.”

As the event took place, the jokes kept coming, there were women in bikinis that AEW couldn’t pay, and the Young Bucks were making jokes about how the show was bleeding money, how they forgot their gear, how they blew the budget and how they can’t pay the models (who were replaced with mannequins by the end of the night).

It was all so weird. Dave Meltzer didn’t appreciate the jokes on Wrestling Observer Radio, claiming while it was a clever parody, AEW shouldn’t have been presenting themselves as a company that is having money issues as it gave the company a bad look, especially if fans didn’t know about the parody of the Fyre Festival.

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Others however saw it differently, with many thinking fans would be in on the joke as AEW to that point had cultivated a strong social media fan base, and so they would be aware of the parody.

Other Fyter Fest events have happened since the first one and all references and parodies of the Fyre Festival have been dropped. The show has simply become just another special event on the schedule.

Whether this was a result of the Fyre Festival parodies not going over well with Tony Khan, as the members of The Elite were still in creative control at this point, or the jokes were just old hat by the time a second Fyter Fest happened is unknown. However, the history of AEW Fyter Fest will always be known as the event which parodied one of the biggest ever failures in live event production.