Morgan Spurlock

Morgan Spurlock (November 7, 1970–May 23, 2024) was an American documentary filmmaker, television producer, and writer best known for Super Size Me (2004). Born in Parkersburg, West Virginia, he studied film at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, graduating in 1993. His breakthrough feature turned a personal experiment into an examination of fast-food marketing, nutrition, and corporate responsibility. For thirty days, Spurlock ate only food sold by McDonald’s, accepted “super-size” offers when asked, limited exercise, and recorded medical changes with physicians. The film premiered at Sundance, where it won the directing award for documentary, and later received an Academy Award nomination.

Spurlock co-founded the production company Warrior Poets with Jeremy Chilnick and used it to make documentaries and unscripted television. His FX series 30 Days, which ran from 2005 to 2008, placed participants in unfamiliar circumstances for a month: episodes involved a minimum-wage worker, a Christian living with Muslims, and a man spending thirty days in jail. In Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden? (2008), he traveled through the Middle East while pursuing a deliberately impossible-sounding search for al-Qaeda’s leader; the film also addressed the regional conditions and political tensions he encountered. His 2011 documentary Pom Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold examined product placement by financing itself through corporate sponsorships.

His other features included The Simpsons 20th Anniversary Special in 3-D! On Ice! (2010), Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope (2011), and One Direction: This Is Us (2013), a concert documentary about the British-Irish pop group. Spurlock also created and hosted CNN’s Inside Man, a series in which he immersed himself in subjects including marijuana businesses, the elder-care industry, and poverty. The program ran for three seasons between 2013 and 2016. In 2016 he directed Rats, adapting Robert Sullivan’s book Rat: How the World’s Most Notorious Rodent Rose to Power. These projects showed his interest in using first-person participation, humor, and accessible popular culture to frame social subjects.

In 2017, amid the #MeToo movement, Spurlock said he had been accused of rape in college and disclosed past sexual misconduct, infidelity, and alcohol misuse; he resigned from Warrior Poets. Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken! premiered at Toronto in 2017 and was released in 2019. Spurlock died in upstate New York at 53, from cancer complications, on May 23, 2024. His death was publicly announced by his family on Friday in a statement.