Numerous live events in recent memory have been giant flops, and while these events might not be fun to attend, attendees are taking to social media to complain. The “immersive” Glasgow WilIy Wonka fiasco in 2024; the original Fyre Festival of 2017; or, to look at a really recent example, there was this month’s Mr. Beast experience in 2025, which promised an event centered around the popular YouTuber. Unfortunately, the experience offered almost nothing for guests, which was a disappointment to fans who spent the weekend hanging out in their rooms instead of doing Mr. Beast-related activities. However, even smaller creators whose TikTok videos featured a peek into the Vegas experience quickly racked up millions of views.
Photo via Random Recess
Photo via TikTok Detective
For small and medium-sized creators, creating behind-the-scenes videos about their experiences can gain them far more views than they normally would get. Many average social media users get just a few hundred or few thousand views per video. So when 1.2 million people are suddenly consuming your content, you’re bound to gain followers, commenters, and people who might stitch your post. The mainstream media might even request to use your video, or maybe a commentary YouTuber will react to your post. Instead of just going to an event and having a bad time, you can turn those lemons into lemonade.
This puts into perspective exactly why people bought tickets to the new Fyre Festival 2. Savvy creators know that even if they had the worst time at the festival, they could make endless amounts of content about the experience. The right content creator could make a plethora of storytime videos and get-ready-with-me’s based around just one event.
Photo via badgalfrancesca
The original 2017 Fyre Festival was not what you’d call a “good time.” In fact, it was a very, very bad time for many of the attendees! Festival-goers shelled out thousands of dollars for the promise of a two-weekend-long music festival set on a private island. It sounds idyllic, but things quickly went south. Bands began to drop out one by one before the actual festival even began. When guests got to the island, they realized they were stranded, and instead of glamping and eating gourmet food, they were stuck in soggy FEMA tents and eating cheese sandwiches from styrofoam containers. People got their luggage stolen, porta-potties were scarce, and as night fell, there was no electricity to light the area. It was pandemonium.
Fyre Festival became a household name for events that turned out really, really badly (aided by two separate documentaries that raised awareness about the fiasco). And it’s clearly not the last event that’s gone wrong since 2017. Remember the endlessly-mocked Glasgow WilIy Wonka experience, which went completely viral in 2024? Videos circulated the internet as news media picked up on the hilarious optics of the event. This AI-driven experience was an unlicensed event that was supposed to immerse audiences in a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory experience. Attendees, many of whom were young children and their parents who were filming the whole time, paid roughly $46 to get in. But similarly to Fyre Fest, this event also overpromised and underdelivered, bringing families to an “empty warehouse” littered with cheap props and staffed by confused actors. One attendee shared photos and videos from the event, which racked up 241k+ likes and 2.1 million views, while others shared their footage to news organizations.
Photo via Taxo
First-person footage from disastrous entertainment events are riveting, and oftentimes, it’s just average Joes who are filming videos or TikToks as they go along. For example, as Hurricane Milton hit Florida in 2024, some folks refused to evacuate, and documented their journeys as their homes flooded. Even as some of these TikTokers voiced that “that was probably the dumbest decision I’ve made yet,” they also gained hundreds of thousands of views from the videos they were creating in real time as the hurricane ripped through the state. Others have stuck it out through the annual California wildfires to make get-ready-with-me’s or film content as flames surrounded them. In both cases, people defied evacuation orders to make their videos—an extremely dangerous act—and in both cases, the rest of the world was glued to these riveting videos of chaos and destruction.
Photo via Jacqueline Goldrich
Humans can’t help but be drawn towards morbid things. So maybe that’s why average Joes were the ones buying tickets to Fyre Festival 2. Though the first was marketed towards elites, it seems like regular people are the ones who purchased passes. Out of all the tickets sold to this event, one user who claimed to review the festival’s code discovered that most people purchased tickets with the lowest price point. These still cost $1,400, which is quite a lot of money for many Americans. But if Coachella trends are any way to compare the trends of today’s event-goers, it’s an eye-opening reveal. People reports that roughly 60% of music festival guests used payment plans to buy their tickets, which start at $649, much less than Fyre Festival 2’s lowest prices.
Perhaps Fyre Festival 2 attendees were hoping their visit would pay off big time from all of the content they could make off of it. I think a lot of them must hope to have a bad time in order to recoup that four-figure sum. I also think we’re going to see a lot more “ensh*tified” events in the future. Ensh*tification is a type of decay: High quality events decline over time, leaving consumers with a worse product, while investors rake in the cash. Why make something good if making it bad will gain you even more buzz? Why bother putting effort into your event if your half-baked attempt makes headlines? Why try at all? Give the people what they want: A terrible spectacle that they can attend and make content out of.
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