Morgan Spurlock Dead at 53: ‘Super Size Me’ Documentarian Had Been Fighting Cancer
Christian Blauvelt
“Super Size Me” director Morgan Spurlock is dead at the age of 53 following a battle with cancer, according to a family statement provided to Deadline.
The Academy Award nominee “passed away peacefully in New York surrounded by family and friends,” the statement read. “Morgan gave so much through his art, ideas, and generosity,” his brother Craig Spurlock is quoted as saying.
Spurlock shot to fame with this 2004 documentary “Super Size Me,” which took a personality-driven approach to examining the way that corporate America incentivizes unhealthy eating as epitomized by McDonald’s then-promotion to “super size” portion sizes for french fries and soft drinks. Following in the wake of Michael Moore, Spurlock adopted a style of putting himself on camera as the host leading his viewers through an exploration of the subject. It was a stunt as well: For the documentary, he engaged in eating only McDonald’s food for 30 days.
That film received a Best Documentary Feature nomination, and he parlayed its awards and financial success into a succession of stylistically similar films that fell short of the original “Super Size Me” in terms of cultural impact such as “Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden?,” “Freakonomics,” and “Rats.” In 2017, he tried to recapture the original film’s success with “Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!”
That same he, amid the dawn of the #MeToo movement, Spurlock preemptively confessed to sexual misconduct in his own past. He tweeted: “As I sit around watching hero after hero, man after man, fall at the realization of their past indiscretions, I don’t sit by and wonder ‘who will be next?’ I wonder, ‘when will they come for me?’”
In a thread he then proceeded to enumerate his own misdeeds and apologized to the women he hurt. The move was controversial because he gave enough detail that it was possible people familiar could identify who the women were. Shortly after, he resigned from his position as head of his production company Warrior Poets, and never made another film.
His “cancellation” appeared to surprise Spurlock. He told Insider in 2019 that he never dreamed his confession “would be complete slash and burn of everything. Within eight days, our whole company was decimated.”
He is survived by two sons.
