Oscar-Nominated ‘Super Size Me’ Director Was 53.

Oscar-nominated filmmaker Morgan Spurlock, director of the groundbreaking documentary Super Size Me, has died after a private battle with cancer. He was 53.

Spurlock “passed away peacefully in New York surrounded by family and friends” on Thursday, according to a family statement that noted the cause was complications of cancer. Deadline understands he had been undergoing chemotherapy treatment earlier this year.

“It was a sad day, as we said goodbye to my brother Morgan,” said Craig Spurlock, one of the filMMAker’s older brothers. They collaborated on several documentary projects, including Morgan Spurlock Inside Man and 7 Deadly Sins. “Morgan gave so much through his art, ideas, and generosity. The world has lost a true creative genius and a special man. I am so proud to have worked together with him.”

For his breakthrough film, Super Size Me, which premiered 20 years ago at the Sundance Film Festival, Spurlock voluntarily ate nothing but McDonald’s food for 30 days in an experiment meant to assess the Health impact of a fast-food diet. He put himself on camera, Michael Moore-style, chronicling how his weight ballooned and he suffered near catastrophic damage to his liver by subsisting on Quarter Pounder combo meals, French fries, flapjacks, breakfast sausages and the like, while slurping soft drinks.

The film earned more than $20 million worldwide, a huge sum for a documentary, and set Spurlock on a path to becoming one of the most successful figures in nonfiction film. But his career derailed during the MeToo movement in https://cdn.thefoxposts.com/vimedia/2024/05/25/560bc6b680f6ce1c02e5e511b18fdda5.webp7 when Spurlock wrote a blog post confessing to a History of sexual misconduct. He resigned from Warrior Poets, the production company he had founded in 2004.

Spurlock’s credits include Mansome, The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, and Where In the World Is Osama Bin Laden? He typically appeared on screen in his documentaries, a genial presence with a handlebar mustache framing a warm smile. His affability cloaked serious explorations of consumerism, advertising, masculinity, and the war on terror. In a departure from his often comedically-inflected investigative films, he directed One Direction: This Is Us, a https://cdn.thefoxposts.com/vimedia/2024/05/25/560bc6b680f6ce1c02e5e511b18fdda5.webp3 music-driven doc about the rise of the British boy band.

“Spurlock fearlessly challenged modern conventions utilizing humor and wit to shed light on societal issues,” the family said in its statement. “His films inspired critical thinking and encouraged viewers to question the status quo. Over thirteen years, through his production company Warrior Poets, Spurlock found additional success producing and directing nearly 70 documentary films and television series.”

The statement continued, “He deeply valued the creative contributions of the talented people who worked on his projects, developing a cadre of freelance production professionals who came back time and again. A great lover of modern artists, Spurlock compiled an extensive art collection, which decorated the walls of his home and the Warrior Poets office in SoHo, New York.”

At the https://cdn.thefoxposts.com/vimedia/2024/05/25/560bc6b680f6ce1c02e5e511b18fdda5.webp7 Toronto International Film Festival, Spurlock premiered Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!, a quasi-sequel which centered around him opening his own fast food joint. The film was not distributed theatrically until two years later; by that point, his career was in some sense over in what many observers considered an act of self-cancellation in the early days of MeToo.

In a Twitlonger post he published on December 14, https://cdn.thefoxposts.com/vimedia/2024/05/25/560bc6b680f6ce1c02e5e511b18fdda5.webp7, Spurlock wrote, “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?’”

Pre-empting that, he “came for himself,” as it were. He wrote of an incident in college in which he and a young woman “hooked up” after a night of drinking. He said he considered the sex consensual, but she did not. He also described settling a sexual harassment claim lodged by an underling at his company, writing, “[I]t wasn’t a gropy feely harassment. It was verbal, and it was just as bad.” In what appeared to be a case of Too Much Information, he also confessed to having been unfaithful to “every wife and girlfriend I have ever had.” He closed the post by writing, “I will do better. I will be better. I believe we all can.”

In https://cdn.thefoxposts.com/vimedia/2024/05/25/560bc6b680f6ce1c02e5e511b18fdda5.webp6, before his personal scandal came to light, Spurlock optioned the book Can I Go Now: The Life of Sue Mengers, Hollywood’s Superagent. That documentary project, about the legendary talent agent, ultimately didn’t come to fruition, and Spurlock had maintained a low profile for years. That was in sharp contrast to his earlier public persona that saw him rival Moore and Ken Burns as America’s most identifiable documentary filmmaker.

For a piece in the UK’s Independent, Spurlock filled in the blanks to a series of pre-set questions. To the prompt, “The household I grew up in…,” he wrote, “I was the youngest of three ballet-dancing brothers. This was in West Virginia, coal mining country – it was very Billy Elliot.” To the question, “When I was a child I wanted to be…,” he answered, “All I ever wanted to do was make movies.”

Spurlock is survived by two sons, Laken and Kallen; his mother Phyllis; his father Ben; brothers Craig and Barry; and former spouses Alexandra Jamieson and Sara Bernstein, the mothers of his children.

The family said memorial service arrangements will be announced in the near future. They added, “In Morgan’s honor, please consider a generous donation to the American Cancer Society Hope Lodge in New York City.”

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