Morgan Spurlock, Director of ‘Super Size Me,’ Dies at 53: NPR

Documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock has died.

Neilson Barnard/Getty Images for DIFF

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Neilson Barnard/Getty Images for DIFF

Filmmaker Morgan Spurlock has died. He was best known for Super Size Me, an inventive 2004 documentary about the fast food industry for which he consumed nothing but McDonald’s fast food for a month. The film was a huge success and grossed over $20 million at the worldwide box office.

Spurlock died Thursday, May 23, in New York from complications of cancer, according to a statement sent by David Magdael, a publicist. He was 53 years old.

Spurlock’s brother, Craig, was quoted in the release.

“It was a sad day, the day we said goodbye to my brother Morgan,” he said. “Morgan has given so much through his art, his ideas and his generosity. The world has lost a true creative genius and a special man. I’m so proud to have worked with him.

Spurlock would produce and direct nearly 70 films and television shows, all documentaries. They included Where in the World is Osama bin Laden?, about the US war in Afghanistan, and The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, a meta-film about movie marketing.

In 2017, during the #MeToo era, Spurlock posted a letter on social media in which he called himself “part of the problem.”

He spoke about a sexual episode in college that his female partner experienced as non-consensual, which Spurlock said he found confusing. “Then there was the time I settled a sexual harassment allegation in my office,” he wrote of the incident, which he said occurred around 2011. And it wasn’t grotesque harassment. It was verbal, and it was just as bad. I called my assistant “hot pants” or “sex pants” when I yelled at her from across the office. Something I found funny at the time, but then realized I had completely belittled and belittled her to the point of making her nonexistent.

Following this letter, Spurlock resigned from his production company and YouTube and Sundance decided not to air his documentary about the corporate takeover of family farms, titled Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken. The film was eventually released and Spurlock spoke of a return to Business Insider in 2019, but his IMDB page does not show any projects he produced after 2017.