super size me 2 holy chicken essay

The Film “Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!”: How the Fast Food Industry Interacts With Its Customers Essay

To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
As a template for you assignment

The concept of fast food has always been taken with a grain of salt since the first fast food outlet was opened. However, despite the low value of fast food, people are still willing to consume it, which can be attributed to the sophisticated marketing strategies and the companies’ ability to create a façade of sustainability and health-oriented manufacturing. “Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!”, a movie by Spurlock, has shown that fast food has direct negative implications on people’s health due to low quality of products used for cooking fast food.

The efforts that fast food chains make to represent themselves as sustainable and health-oriented have been perceived as questionable, at best, up until recently, when the introduction of innovative tools has allowed making fast food seemingly healthier. Due to the inability to fact-check the information that fast food companies provide, buyers tend to take the statements made by these companies for granted, which leads to a drop in their ability to question the quality of the food. The described causal relationships are particularly evident in the movie: “Let’s have a conversation of how healthy our sandwiches are” (Calogero LM, 2020). As a result, low quality of McDonald’s food has direct implications on people’s health. Obesity is the primary outcome in this cause-and-effect relationship, the choice of meals being the main cause, and weight gain among customers representing the key effect on their health (Calogero LM, 2020).

Another obvious cause and effect relationship portrayed in the film concerns the rise in the threat of diseases such as diabetes as the effect of the food choices that McDonald’s provides to its customers. Although the direct connection between the development of diabetes and the consumption of McDonald’s food specifically is yet to be proven, indirect facts point not only to correlation but also to causation in the food that McDonald’s offers and the increase in health risks such as diabetes type II (Tong & Wong, 2016). Therefore, there is an ostensible and highly probable cause-and-effect relationship between the specified issues, which is why McDonald’s policies regarding food quality and production process require more detailed scrutiny.

Finally, one should mention the obvious connection between the quality of the product offered by McDonald’s, as well as its affordability and availability, and the increase in the threat of cardiovascular diseases in customers. As the video shows, since McDonald’s uses products with high fat saturation, the probability of consumers who purchase McDonald’s products frequently to develop cardiovascular issues increases exponentially (Calogero LM, 2020). In turn, the solution to the dilemma that McDonald’s has created, namely, the choice between the taste of the product and its health-related value, is rather complicated. Although Spurlock’s idea of becoming a part of the problem may imply complicating the relationships between customers and fast food organizations even more, it leads to unraveling the truth, thus contributing to the resolution of the conflict.

The movie has demonstrated that, due to the ability to balance between the brand image of a sustainable organization and the focus on minimizing production costs, organizations operating in the fast food industry have been using low-quality raw materials to produce the food that causes people to experience health complications, which is a prime example of cause-and-effect relationships. In turn, the rise in the amount of negative publicity that fast food organizations receive could produce a greater impact if customers remained more skeptical about the claims that fast food organizations provide. Thus, a combination of marketing efforts and the attempts at sweeping adverse effects of fast food under the rug leads to multiple health issues.

Calogero LM. (2020). Super size me 2: Holy chicken . [Video]. YouTube .

Tong, C., & Wong, A. (2016). The effects of corporate social responsibility of fast-food restaurants on corporate reputation. Journal of Marketing and HR, 3 (1), 126-144.

The Frozen (TV) Dinners: A Review
“The Bitter Truth About Fast Food” by Schlosser
Cause-and-Effect Analysis Tool
My First Spurlock Museum Exhibit
"Babel" and "Super Size Me": Documentaries Analysis
Junk Food in Schools: Good or Bad for Children?
Pizza: A Poem With No Words
The Effects of the McDonaldization of Society
Survey to Study the Relationship Between Fast Food Consumption and Obesity
McDonald’s in the Context of Obesity Problem
Chicago (A-D)
Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2022, February 26). The Film “Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!”: How the Fast Food Industry Interacts With Its Customers. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-film-super-size-me-2-holy-chicken-how-the-fast-food-industry-interacts-with-its-customers/

"The Film “Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!”: How the Fast Food Industry Interacts With Its Customers." IvyPanda , 26 Feb. 2022, ivypanda.com/essays/the-film-super-size-me-2-holy-chicken-how-the-fast-food-industry-interacts-with-its-customers/.

IvyPanda . (2022) 'The Film “Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!”: How the Fast Food Industry Interacts With Its Customers'. 26 February.

IvyPanda . 2022. "The Film “Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!”: How the Fast Food Industry Interacts With Its Customers." February 26, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-film-super-size-me-2-holy-chicken-how-the-fast-food-industry-interacts-with-its-customers/.

1. IvyPanda . "The Film “Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!”: How the Fast Food Industry Interacts With Its Customers." February 26, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-film-super-size-me-2-holy-chicken-how-the-fast-food-industry-interacts-with-its-customers/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "The Film “Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!”: How the Fast Food Industry Interacts With Its Customers." February 26, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-film-super-size-me-2-holy-chicken-how-the-fast-food-industry-interacts-with-its-customers/.

Essay Editor

The Film "Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!"

1. introduction.

The fast food industry has had a significant impact on society, shaping various aspects of our lives. This introduction will provide an overview of the topic and highlight the importance of understanding the consequences of fast food consumption. Fast food has become an integral part of the modern lifestyle, offering convenience and affordability. However, it has also raised concerns regarding its effects on public health, the environment, and social dynamics. By examining the history, films, and related research, we can gain a comprehensive understanding of the fast food industry's implications and make informed choices as consumers and members of society.

2. History of Fast Food Industry

The fast food industry has a fascinating history that can be traced back to the early 20th century. One of the pioneers of fast food was White Castle, which opened its doors in 1921 and introduced the concept of standardized, inexpensive hamburgers. This paved the way for other major players like McDonald's, which was founded in 1940 and revolutionized the industry with its efficient assembly-line system. The post-World War II era saw a boom in the fast food industry as Americans embraced the convenience and affordability that these establishments offered. Fast food chains expanded rapidly, and by the 1970s, the industry had become a dominant force in the American diet. This growth was driven by factors such as increased car ownership, suburbanization, and changing lifestyles. Today, the fast food industry continues to evolve, adapting to consumer demands and incorporating new technology to enhance efficiency and convenience.

3. The Film "Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!"

The documentary film "Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!" explores the fast food industry and its impact on society. Directed by Morgan Spurlock, this thought-provoking film follows Spurlock as he ventures into the world of fast food once again, but this time focusing on the chicken industry. Through his journey, Spurlock sheds light on the marketing strategies employed by fast food chains to attract consumers and the consequences of their practices. The film aims to inform viewers about the realities of the industry and the implications it has on both individuals and society as a whole.

3.1. Overview of the Film

In the film "Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!", director Morgan Spurlock provides an engaging overview of the fast food industry. He highlights the transformation of fast food chains into agribusinesses and explores the strategies they use to manipulate consumers, specifically focusing on the chicken industry. Spurlock examines the marketing tactics, such as branding and advertising, employed by these establishments to create demand and loyalty among consumers. Additionally, he delves into the behind-the-scenes operations and reveals the ethical and social implications of the fast food industry's practices.

3.2. Exploring the Fast Food Industry

Through the film "Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!", the fast food industry is thoroughly explored. Morgan Spurlock unveils the inner workings of this industry by showcasing the various stages involved in chicken production, from raising chickens on factory farms to the final processed products served in fast food restaurants. Moreover, he shines a light on the use of antibiotics, hormones, and genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in the production of fast food, raising concerns about the impact of these practices on human health. The film provides a comprehensive examination of the industry's practices and their consequences.

3.3. Impact on Consumer Behavior

The fast food industry has a significant impact on consumer behavior, as depicted in the film "Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!". Through persuasive marketing techniques, fast food chains influence consumers' choices and preferences, leading to an increased consumption of unhealthy food. The film sheds light on the power of branding, advertising, and product placement in shaping consumer behavior. Additionally, it explores the addictive nature of fast food and the detrimental effects it can have on individuals, such as obesity, poor nutrition, and negative long-term health outcomes.

3.4. Ethical and Social Implications

Ethical and social implications related to the fast food industry are brought to the forefront in the film "Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!". Director Morgan Spurlock examines the exploitative practices employed by fast food chains, including the mistreatment of animals, the environmental impact of factory farming, and the exploitation of low-wage workers. Moreover, he questions the ethics behind the deceptive marketing strategies used to promote fast food products. By highlighting these issues, the film prompts viewers to reflect on the ethical responsibilities of the industry and the societal consequences of its actions.

3.5. Conclusion

In conclusion, the film "Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!" provides a compelling exploration of the fast food industry and its impact on society. It offers an overview of the industry, examines its practices, and reveals the influence it has on consumer behavior. Moreover, the film delves into the ethical and social implications of the industry, prompting viewers to consider the consequences of their choices as consumers. Overall, "Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!" serves as a call to action, encouraging individuals to critically analyze the fast food industry and its effects on society.

La importancia de la toma de decisiones en el liderazgo empresarial.

1. Introducción El liderazgo empresarial en la actualidad se está perfilando como el factor primordial para el éxito en las compañías. El líder es visto como la persona que posee una gran influencia sobre las demás, siendo en general muchas veces un jefe para algunas personas de grupo laboral, y por tanto su papel en determinadas circunstancias como la motivación personal y profesional. Este es el objeto de estudio de este trabajo: el liderazgo empresarial, de tal manera que se vuelve necesario ...

The Impact of Del Petro Leo's Innovations on the Global Oil Industry

1. Introduction Over the past few years, the relevance of Del Petro Leo's work has been enriched by several publications that help to understand the complexity of the oil and natural gas industries. However, these contributions still leave some areas unexplored. This work revisits the main discoveries of Del Petro Leo, using new data and previously unexplored materials. We argue that the New Institutional Economics and institutional complementarities between technology and market structures had ...

The Impact of Social Media Marketing on Brand Promotion and Consumer Behavior

1. Introduction Modern world economy is increasingly becoming globalized and knowledge-based. This means that largely due to high levels of connectivity among business people, nations, education and business processes are extensively relying on, and are being reshaped by the internet and electronic commerce where information is being shared at an unprecedented rate. As such, marketing executives are continually looking for newer, more efficient ways of reaching their desired consumers and corre ...

The Impact of Cultural Diversity on Business Strategy and Promotion in New York (NY)

1. Introduction National and local organizations cultivate a vibrant business sector for the city of New York through a range of business development efforts, including job promotion, bid preparation, networking and matchmaking events, and connections to services and incentive programs. New York State has a diverse economy with various areas of new business growth, including emerging technology markets, and it also has one of the most culturally diverse populations in the United States. Many di ...

Analyzing the Effectiveness of Structured Interviews in the Hiring Process

1. Introduction The 21st-century modernization we are experiencing is also reflected in the amount of employment opportunities the labor market is able to create, which in turn has made the hiring process an important challenge for the organizations in their attempt to select from the existing pool of human talent. Therefore, adopting effective, valid, and reliable selection techniques to differentiate between those individuals who are more likely to perform better in the event that they are hi ...

The Impact of AI Marketing on Consumer Behavior and Business Strategies

1. Introduction Worldwide marketing spending has responded to the increasing demand for accurate and vivid customer experiences offered through personalized, near real-time digital and social channels. According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) 2019 Digital Video Study, sensors such as those measuring time spent and sentiment analysis, as well as artificial intelligence, which powers algorithms, are transforming the media landscape. The rapid pace of personalized delivery encouraged ...

El impacto de la logística y la tecnología en la eficiencia de la cadena de suministro

1. Introducción a la logística y la cadena de suministro Como sabemos, la cadena de suministro existe desde que el hombre comenzó a intercambiar mercancías como respuesta a sus necesidades. Desde ese instante, de un lado o el otro del camino que siguiera, nació la necesidad de acopiar o acumular los productos que vienen, requiriendo de diversos tipos de estructuras o sistemas logísticos para el cumplimiento de esa función. Tras cumplir esta etapa, no escapó a su perspicacia la mejor forma de re ...

The Impact of Advertising and Promotion on Consumer Behavior in New York City

1. Introduction Advertising communication messages are mandatory for creating customer awareness and among the most important marketing concerns in the promotion mix elements. Advertising enables a marketer to showcase benefits and features that enhance its image and product future performance. Both advertising and promotion have a profound impact on consumer preferences, attitudes, perceptions, and behaviors as well. Both affect target audience knowledge, opinions, and intentions. Advertising ...

Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, collections, chaz's journal, great movies, contributors, super size me 2: holy chicken.

Now streaming on:

“Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!” sat on the shelf for two years after its director-star Morgan Spurlock admitted to sexual harassment in a New York Times article. If I hadn’t known that, the timing of this film’s release would have seemed a bit too perfect. America is currently flipping out over the (admittedly delicious) Popeye’s Chicken Sandwich, and this sequel to the Oscar-nominated “ Super Size Me ” looks at the chicken sandwich industry. But rather than constantly subject himself to fast-food consumption as he did in the original documentary, Spurlock has instead decided to feed other consumers. We follow him as he plans to open his own chicken-themed fast food franchise that’s completely transparent about its ingredients and its intentions.

The “Holy Chicken!” subtitle is clearly meant to evoke Chick Fil-A, that extremely popular chicken sandwich place whose owners love contributing to anti-LGBT causes. Spurlock intends to go after them, but this film needed to be angrier and more forceful in its depiction of its more unsavory element; it's way too nonchalant for much of its runtime. One of the rare moments it engenders a powerful emotional response is during a scene featuring chicken farmers enmeshed in a lawsuit against the huge conglomerate that is ruining them with unpayable debt. There’s a real sense of loss there. Beyond that, there’s a nagging aura of “meh” encircling the proceedings.

Like Michael Moore , Morgan Spurlock has a particular shtick that drives some people crazy. You know who you are, and I’m surprised you’ve gotten this far in this review. He doesn’t bother me, so consider that a caveat. He made me laugh several times, in fact. What does bug me about “Super Size Me 2” is that it only skims the surface of the habitual human behavior Spurlock wishes to explore and exploit with his “transparent” marketing. He has some very good ideas at play here, but they’re presented in a lackluster fashion that kept sending my mind to other places where his material had been done before and better.

For example, Spurlock rightfully goes after the words being used to sell food to people. Words like “organic,” “crispy,” “homestyle,” “free-range” and other adjectives designed to trigger a response in the consumer. There’s an interesting, if too short scene where he asks for clarification from the USDA about some of these words. There’s also a "man on the street" interview showing how confused people actually are about these monikers. Still, my mind wandered to George Carlin who, decades before, had a magnificent routine about this exact thing. “Everything is organic!” Carlin says, mocking one of the biggest words used to make customers feel woke about their purchases.

In order to achieve his goal of creating a chicken joint that explains to people exactly what food they’re getting and the side of marketing manipulation that comes with it, Spurlock must first obtain some chickens and a farm where he can raise them. He calls his agricultural experiment “Morganic Farms.” We learn that, like everything else in the good ol’ USA, the chicken industry is a large corporate entity with powerful lobbyists protecting their interests. The film calls the industry “Big Chicken” and they control the distribution of live product for farms. Big Chicken has seen “Super Size Me,” so when Spurlock calls to inquire setting up a farm, he’s met with much resistance. He’s bailed out by the largest independent hatchery, who supplies him with over 2,000 broilers, “the most popular chickens on Earth.”

These chickens are bred to grow faster and bigger than their feathers will cover them at some points in their development. “In six weeks, they’ll be ready for the dinner plate,” we’re told. This unnaturally rapid growth leads to some rather horrific health consequences for some of the birds of Morganic Farms—their bones break and several suddenly go into cardiac arrest and die. But as the vet hired to do an onscreen autopsy tells us, this is normal and “the birds are not harmful to eat.”

Assisting Spurlock is farmer Jonathan Buttram, who rents a building to Morganic Farms and, along with his son, helps tend to the chickens. Buttram is the heart of “Super Size Me 2,” a guy locked into a contract with Big Chicken who’ll pay the price for helping the filmmakers. In a buttery Southern accent, Buttram tells us how he doesn’t really want his son to continue the family business. Part of that resistance stems from the Tournament System, a way for Big Chicken to punish/reward chicken farmers while simultaneously creating rules to keep them so in debt that they’re practically indentured servants.

With his chickens procured, Spurlock ventures out to meet with strategists and inventors to design a new sandwich to sell. The search leads him to a San Francisco firm called CCD Innovation. Their test kitchens have created several successful fast-food products including the culinary colonic known as the Taco Bell Gordita. People love these and other items despite knowing that they’re not good for them. As Anne Burrell says on Food Network, “brown food tastes good.” And healthy food tastes like crap, so a place only needs to give the illusion of something that’s good for you. Those salads at Wendy’s have more calories than a burger, but it’s a salad! Green equals good, as Spurlock discovers. I won’t spoil the type of sandwich that gets created here, but I will say I’ll never look at grill marks on a fast-food meat product the same way again.

“Food is an experience,” says Darby Hughes, one of the strategist talking heads interviewed on camera. When we finally get a look at the experience the “Holy Chicken” restaurant provides its customers, the response of the people who eat there is barely explored. They know they’re being deluded, yet they don’t seem to care. They barely flinch at the most awful parts of the process, and yet this consumer response is supposed to be the film’s thesis.

Again, my mind wandered to a news item I saw years ago about my hometown of Jersey City, New Jersey. A news investigation discovered that Newark Bay was so contaminated that anything swimming in it was carcinogenic. The news lady interviewed a guy who’d just pulled some crab cages out of the Bay. “Did you know eating just one of those crabs could give you cancer?” she asked. “I did not know that,” replied the guy. “I’ve eaten them before.” “Now that you know, are you gonna throw those back?” she asked. “No,” said the guy. “They taste good.” That news lady’s investigative report and shocked reaction was far more revealing (and more hilarious) than Spurlock’s reaction to his similarly posed experiment. And she did it In four minutes. “Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!” takes 93.

Odie Henderson

Odie "Odienator" Henderson has spent over 33 years working in Information Technology. He runs the blogs Big Media Vandalism and Tales of Odienary Madness. Read his answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

Now playing

Peyton Robinson

Brian Tallerico

Dirty Pop: The Boy Band Scam

Crumb Catcher

Robert daniels.

Space Cadet

Film credits.

Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken! movie poster

Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken! (2019)

Morgan Spurlock as Himself

Morgan Spurlock

Latest blog posts

The Fairy Tale Shoes: Interview With the Cast and Crew of Cuckoo

On the Trail: India Donaldson on Good One

The Texture of Night: How Collateral Revolutionized Movies

SDCC 2024: Activations, Apes and Other Animals

an image, when javascript is unavailable

site categories

Auli’i cravalho teases ‘moana’ future: “stay tuned, we’re only getting started” – d23, morgan spurlock on the super-size #metoo life lessons learned after his voluntary trip down the rabbit hole.

By Mike Fleming Jr

Mike Fleming Jr

Co-Editor-in-Chief, Film

2024 Premiere Dates For New & Returning Series On Broadcast, Cable & Streaming

'The Frog' Teaser: Mysterious Guests Disturb The Peace In Netflix Korea Series

The Super Size Me sequel drew a strong response two Toronto Film Festivals ago, where Spurlock got a $3.5 million distribution deal from YouTube Red that immediately put the film in profit, and promised a theatrical and VOD release that ensured that the chicken farmers who sued Big Chicken and risked themselves by appearing in and helping Spurlock grow his own chicken crop for the film would have their day in the court of public opinion. It would be an important film for Spurlock’s Warrior Poets, where he and his cohorts had numerous documentary series and films percolating.

Watch on Deadline

Two months later, everything was gone within days of Spurlock voluntarily posting a confessional essay on social media . Behind the scenes, success brought excess and unhappiness for Spurlock. After watching the rise of #MeToo and a line of male Hollywood executives exposed and toppled for harassment and worse perpetrated against women, Spurlock’s essay labeled himself “part of the problem.” His revelation of such personal details as being sexually abused as a youth, and of unchecked depression and alcoholism, got drowned out in the blunt details of his sometimes boorish behavior toward women. He described a boozy bedroom encounter in college he believed was consensual, but which led the other student to write a classroom essay in which she named Spurlock and thought she might have been raped; there was an admission he settled a sexual harassment allegation at his office with a payoff to an assistant to whom he made marginalizing references like “hot pants.” And how he had been unfaithful to every girlfriend he ever had.

Spurlock was so sure his come-clean missive would provoke needed discussion about the growing specter of “MeToo and Time’s Up that he grew impatient for it to be noticed, and sent it repeatedly to outlets like the New York Times . Just to make sure it didn’t get lost. Then he prepared to go into rehab. The results weren’t what he imagined. Spurlock misread the level of boiled-up anger from women who for too long had been marginalized and treated second class, with some being forced to see their natural ambition and dreams get twisted to serve the perverse desires of powerful men. Rather than provoke discussion, Spurlock was effectively banished, lumped in with outed serial predators.

By the time he returned from rehab for his alcohol problem, Spurlock’s company was gone. YouTube Red bailed on the movie deal and got its money back; all 65 employees at Warrior Poets were let go; and projects like the TNT docu-series on women’s issues done in partnership with Sarah Jessica Parker were scrapped. It frayed his marriage and left on the hook the chicken growers who risked their livelihoods to appear in Holy Chicken! , hoping that wide exposure might ease their hardship the way the original movie spurred reforms in the fast food industry.

Cut to today. Spurlock found a more modest and low key release for the sequel through Goldwyn, which distributed the first Super Size Me and recently opened the sequel in a small number of theaters in New York, LA, Chicago and other major cities before it got released on digital, where it can now be seen. Spurlock has been promoting it with the same kind of pop-up chicken sandwich restaurant seen in the film. He’ll be there another week, on 23rd Street and 5th Avenue in Manhattan, slinging chicken sandwiches and hard truths about the poultry industry.

Spurlock’s decision to come clean lends it self to an easy parallel to Jerry Maguire . In that film, an existential crisis “mission statement” written by Tom Cruise’s sports agent and dispersed to co-workers saw him immediately lose his job, saw all but one client fire him, and saw him lose his girlfriend. It sent him on a journey that left him a better man, even if he was still struggling to come back professionally. Redemption movies have always been a staple in Hollywood, but is there room in the industry for an imperfect man who wants to resume his storytelling career? That exploration will be the next step in the evolution of Spurlock, who recently took Deadline through a detailed tour of his self-inflicted trip down the rabbit hole, tearing up numerous times over lunch as he recounted the pain his decision to use social media as a confessional caused his family, friends and colleagues, and his career.

DEADLINE: There is a moment early in Holy Chicken! where you talk about your plan to go undercover as a chicken grower to uncover abuses in the industry. You say, “If I’ve learned anything from making a career out of questionable life choices, sometimes the only way to solve a problem is to become part of that problem.” Given that is the language you used to start your fateful essay, did you consider the irony and perhaps thought of dropping it from the new film?

SPURLOCK : No. It wasn’t my intention [to draw parallels]. The whole idea when we made the film was, I wanted to become a part of the machine. So to become part of that machine to tell the story is what makes the film so fun. To become the man behind the curtain, to get to become kind of Colonel Sanders in this journey. i don’t know, it’s one of those things where I so separated the two [the documentary and the essay]…I see the connection, but I feel like the movie lives in its own universe, separate from what my life lives in.

DEADLINE: Why did you publish that essay at such a harsh moment in culture and especially the entertainment business?

SPURLOCK : A confluence of events led to this. I had just gotten back from a film festival in Dubai, where we showed the film, and for days I was there living it up, as you do at film festivals. When I got home, I said to my wife, I got to change my life. And that next morning, I woke up…and this was before I had written any of this…and from the coffee shop under my office, I booked myself into rehab. Later that morning, I went to a doctor I was seeing about something else that was happening within my family. We were talking about just kind of the history of depression in the family. I said, well, there’s nothing on my side of the family. He asked, what about you? I said, I’m depressed every day. He says, what do you mean you’re depressed every day? When? I said, every morning when I wake up and every night when I go to bed. He said, what do you do? I said, I get up and I start my day, I put my feet on the floor. I got a family that I love, an office full of people that depend on me. I got a job that I feel so fortunate to get to do every day. But the minute it all stops? Also, I was thinking about everything that was happening at that time. There were a lot of women in our office, and [the issue of harassment] was a subject that was talked about all the time. As I was driving back into the city from this doctor’s appointment, I said to myself, I have to talk about this. It started off with me thinking I needed to first talk about my depression and talk about what I’d been going through, the way I emotionally felt at the time. And then it just kind of grew into a much bigger thing for me. It became this stream of consciousness emotional purge that I just had to get out. This moment where it’s like, I have to talk about this. Whether it was a moment of clarity or guilt, I felt like I needed to own up to things that happened in my past. As somebody who has made a career out of trying to find the truth and to talk about things…I wanted to say that I can do better, I can be better.

DEADLINE : Did something happen in Dubai to prompt this extreme desire to change your life?

SPURLOCK : I got back Monday, and I wrote this on Wednesday night. I think it was just years of post- Super Size Me , post the separation and the divorce from my ex-wife, falling in love with my current wife…

DEADLINE : The ex was the dietictian we saw in Super Size Me ?

SPURLOCK : Correct.

DEADLINE: Having covered movies so long, I often relate circumstances to scenes in films. Yours was the Jerry Maguire mission statement, and that moment in Platoon where Keith David’s King character says to Charlie Sheen, wait, you volunteered for this sh*t? Which came closest to how you felt after the essay got widely publicized and doors began closing?

SPURLOCK : I mean, it wasn’t like I was standing in the back of the room going, ooh, are those scarlet letters? Let me get one. That wasn’t my intention or hope. I guess the Jerry Maguire analogy is probably very close because I felt like I needed to share something in the midst of this conversation that just seemed to dominate that moment in time. And social media felt like something that can take you down to a place where…you feel like you are talking to someone who is like…you and I having this conversation. But it’s much different than that.

DEADLINE: Well, the difference, especially in that moment, is that after years of abuse, there was zero latitude for indiscretion, even one that happened decades ago. I find even in the comments on Deadline stories a prevailing desire to see people ended, when they admit flaws. But you were the one who wrote that essay and pressed the button, instead of confessing to a priest or therapist. What do you most regret about that decision?

SPURLOCK : I regret a lot of things about it. I regret the impact it had on my family. I regret the impact it had on my friendships. I regret the impact it had on 65 people, who were working in my office, and then, within a week were suddenly out of a job. The week before Christmas, who suddenly had…

DEADLINE: It happened that fast?

SPURLOCK : That fast. Within a week, everything was done.

DEADLINE: Meaning?

SPURLOCK : Every project. YouTube bought Super Size Me . I published that essay Wednesday. They pulled out of the film by that Friday.

DEADLINE: I recall they won a bidding battle and paid $3.5 million for distribution rights and they were going to release it wide, a signature film for a new player in indie film .

SPURLOCK : Yeah. So, the film was in the black, just from that deal, which never happens for a documentary. We were so excited about, it was a great distribution partnership. The film was going to go to Sundance and then SXSW. And it all fell apart, along with everything else we were working on. All the TV shows, all the movies. Everything went away. That didn’t hurt nearly as much as the fact that all of the people who I loved and cared about and who depended on all this great creative stuff we were making at that company were suddenly out of work. To be in that position right before the holidays was the worst thing ever.

DEADLINE: I went back and looked at the reader comments that followed Deadline’s report about your essay. There was a prevailing opinion that, well, he tried to get out in front before some exposé came out, before the train hit him. And yet I didn’t see a litany of women saying they had been victimized…

SPURLOCK : No, there wasn’t anything like that and that wasn’t the reason. For me, it was just a moment where I really felt compelled to come clean, to share the behavioral mistakes that I’d made along the way and the lapses of behavioral judgment that I’d made that I wanted to own up to. We all make bad choices over the years, and for me, it was one of those things where I wanted to put that out there, as a person and as a man, as a husband, as a father. To say I want to admit and accept the things that I’d done, and figure out a way to move forward. And I have to say, I’m grateful for how I feel today, on day 620 of my sobriety. I became dedicated to making amends.

DEADLINE: To whom did you make amends?

SPURLOCK : I’ve tried to make right with my family, and to make amends, to people over the years that I felt like I should’ve treated better along the way. That’s a big part of the journey, right now.

DEADLINE : You mentioned that incident in college. There were no formal charges. Did you hear from that woman after your essay?

SPURLOCK : No.

DEADLINE : Why did you feel so strongly about discussing that college encounter?

SPURLOCK : I just felt like it was something that I needed to just discuss in a way that would allow me to let go of this moment that stuck in my head and made me feel regret and shame.

DEADLINE : You mentioned you told your wife you were going to do something when you returned from that festival. What impact did all this have on your marriage?

SPURLOCK : You mean with my wife? I’d rather not go there. I feel like I’ve brought her and my family into enough of the conversation that I’d rather keep that part out of it, at this point.

DEADLINE : You mentioned an assistant whom you referred to as “hot pants” and “sex pants,” to whom you paid a settlement when she left the job to keep it quiet. I recall reading about a young woman who got a similar job working for Dustin Hoffman and when she asked what he wanted for breakfast he made a crude female anatomical remark for the amusement of his friends. You could just imagine how marginalized and cut down that young woman must have felt, being so young and hearing that from someone so famous. I couldn’t understand how Hoffman could be so insensitive when he could have said something positive that might have bolstered her confidence and ambition to be part of this industry. Why would you say something like that to the young woman in your office? Was that back and forth banter normal in the workplace at that time?

SPURLOCK : When I look back on it, I regret having said these things. I think I said these things thinking I was making a joke, that these things were funny. I look at my own insecurities of how I dealt with things for years, of how I made jokes about other people or I would make comments about them. At the end of the day, it was just to make myself feel better and the root of the years of depression that I had and still have.

DEADLINE: I recently interviewed Sarah Treem for the launch of the final season of her Showtime series The Affair . She’s about as sharp a writer as you will come across, and she was talking about how she infused her own experience when she started in the business, when younger men would come from the same Yale drama school program she did, and she wanted to scream because she couldn’t understand why her bosses didn’t see the value of her writing the way they did the words written by these newcomers, because they were men. It made me consider how tough it must have been for a woman to exercise her ambition in a male-dominated business. You’ve had time to think about all this stuff. What have you come to realize about how these women deserve to be treated in the workplace? Were there some women who smartened you up on this subject?

SPURLOCK : I’ve talked to a lot of women, who worked for my company for years, and people who work in the business. And what I think is, what’s happening now is important, and necessary. I think the swing of the pendulum to put more women in positions of power, to elevate the voices that have been silenced for so long, it matters. All of this has changed the way that I look at how I want to run a company moving forward, and the people that I want to work with and surround myself with. I think all of that has impacted me in an immense way.

DEADLINE : Describe the aftermath of your essay, when suddenly you were stepping down from Warrior Poets?

SPURLOCK : I didn’t step down. I went to rehab, and I think my partners wanted to make that announcement to try and salvage whatever work we could. I completely understand and respect the choice that they made. But I came back from rehab to the company and tried to keep it going for a year-and-a-half. Until, ultimately, I filed for bankruptcy in July.

DEADLINE : It must have been a far cry from when 65 people worked for you…

SPURLOCK : It went down to, when I came back from California, there was myself, and my brother.

DEADLINE : Can you describe how that felt?

SPURLOCK : Basically, it’s a tremendous feeling of loss. I was very sad. It was sad to have lost so many friends. It’s sad to have lost so many people that you loved and were surrounded by for so long. I walked into the office, and it was like a tomb. And everything was exactly where it was when we left. There was still like notebooks and Avids, and there were still shows up on computers that people were working on. It was really just like everything stopped. Like that show The Leftovers , where everybody had just vanished. I came into the office, and it was really…it was so hard to be there. But I tried…and for me, the biggest thing I didn’t want to have go away was this movie. We had this great movie that was sitting on a shelf. Apart from everybody in the office who relied on me, there were these farmers who so depended on me and the fact I let these guys down hurt more than anything. For months, it became, how do I get this thing that is the most valuable asset we have right now, out into the world. Thank goodness for Goldwyn, for Peter Goldwyn, who stepped up to say, we want to put this movie out. They put the first one out, and they weren’t afraid to stand by this one. And I’m really grateful to them.

DEADLINE : You also had that TNT series, a docu-series collaboration with Sarah Jessica Parker on women’s issues…

SPURLOCK : Which also went away. Quickly. One after the other. So, that was a Wednesday when I wrote that essay. That show was gone by Thursday.

DEADLINE : The behavior you described was not on the order of Harvey Weinstein, Les Moonves and others. What were the conversations like as you tried to plead your case and save those projects?

SPURLOCK : Yes, but people wanted to…again, I don’t fault anyone. We were working on a show with them that was all about women’s rights and women’s issues when this happened. So we tried just to extricate me from the process. But that wasn’t enough.

DEADLINE : The optics were terrible, looking at this from their standpoint…

SPURLOCK : I totally understand. We even tried to just give the show to Pretty Matches so that they would just take it and make it. By that point, TNT, I don’t believe they wanted to move forward with it. Just based on the kind of baggage, that I was associated with it, from their point of view.

DEADLINE: Was it similar to the conversation with YouTube Red over Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken! ?

SPURLOCK : I had a conversation. And again, it was a hard conversation because we all love the movie. But they just felt they couldn’t put it out.

DEADLINE : Watching Holy Chicken! , the plight of those farmers is much of the backbone of a pretty terrific film. They put themselves at risk helping you grow the chickens you used for your pop-up restaurant. And they were blacklisted by Big Chicken for helping you and appearing in the movie. What were those conversations like, telling them you lost distribution?

SPURLOCK : I called Jonathan and his wife Connie, they’re in the film.

DEADLINE : His picture’s on the wall of the pop-up restaurant at the end of the film.

SPURLOCK : Correct. I called the two of them on my way to rehab. On my way to get on the plane to go. And I was crying, and they were crying. They said, we just hope you’re okay, and that was…oh, it just makes me cry all over again [he tears up].

DEADLINE : That was selfless of them. Your essay dealt with a tangle of complex personal issues. You talked about alcoholism and depression, you disclosed that you had been molested as a young person. Had you ever talked to anyone about that before?

SPURLOCK : Never.

DEADLINE : Or sought out medical care that might have included taking an anti-depressant?

SPURLOCK : Never medicated. That was the thing, but that was part of it. I was self-medicating for a long time. A lot of this began I guess around like 2010, 2011. It was even before that – Super Size Me came out in 2004 — but I think it just kind of amplified more as more started to happen.

DEADLINE : What factor is it when a movie like Super Size Me hits the way it did? Documentary makers especially back then mostly toil in anonymity. But your film made you a celebrity…

SPURLOCK : It was exciting, overwhelming, and you’re suddenly thrust into a world where there’s a lot of opportunity for drinking, for bad behavior. It continued to grow and amplify all the way up to 2017, when I had this moment of clarity that I needed to change. I think people have a very specific view of alcoholism, which is that it means you’re going out and you’re drinking every day, that you are hitting the sauce starting in the morning, that you have the bottle of vodka in your desk drawer. It’s not like that. I thought I was a social drinker; I would go out a couple times a week. But you go to a drinks meeting, into a dinner meeting, and then another drink meeting after that, and I would get to the point where I would make bad behavioral choices.

DEADLINE : Fueled by the cumulative effect of the alcohol?

SPURLOCK : Yeah, I think fueled by that and also fueled by…I had this black hole that I was continuing trying to fill inside of me. And it was filled through those types of activities, so it was alcoholism, it was workaholism. It was all about, how do I more, how do I work more, how do I continue to grow this business that I have, this opportunity and this career that I’m building. So it was literally just like, more, all the time. And it led to other choices.

DEADLINE: How did rehab help you address all this?

SPURLOCK : I think, it gave me clarity. It just gave me a moment to step back and look at me, and understand why I had made the choices I’d made, why I’ve acted the way that I did. It was a place that was for dual diagnosis, also a place where I could go and for the first time in my life, have real open conversations about depression. It was transformative for me. I know for a lot of people that it doesn’t work. But for me, I came back and saw the world in a very different way, and saw my actions in a different way. I saw the way I wanted to live my life and treat people, the husband I wanted to be, the father I wanted to be, in a very different way.

DEADLINE: What is the most valuable lesson you’ve learned?

SPURLOCK : Gratitude.

DEADLINE: Even though you damaged your career and lost your company to get here?

SPURLOCK : Yeah. I think it’s…making me emotional again [he pauses to compose himself]. It’s one of those things where you get swept up in the moments [of career accomplishment], and you lose sight of being grateful to the people around you, your family. It was hard when I looked at how I treated a lot of the relationships that I had, didn’t show the love and gratitude to them when I should have. It hurts, a lot. And how I think I could have…I think…I don’t know, I think gratitude is the big part.

DEADLINE : Does this rebuilding continue after you walk out of rehab?

SPURLOCK : It doesn’t end. I’m in AA, I’m working the steps, I’m in the process of making amends to the people that I love and care about and that I feel like I need to really reach out to and speak to. It’s part of the journey and the process, right now, for me.

DEADLINE : A lot of people, the ones you worked with, paid a high price for that essay. How have they responded?

SPURLOCK : There are people who want to sit down and talk to me, there’s people who don’t. There is still a lot of pain associated with it in many ways. For me, it’s continuing to accept that and move forward. I’m more present in my life than I’ve ever been. I’m more present in my kid’s life than I’ve ever been. My relationship with my family, that’s been the best part of this whole process.

DEADLINE: What might have happened had you remained on the track you were on, and not written that essay?

SPURLOCK : It’s a real question. I had just shot a daytime talk show pilot for a network that had been green lighted to move forward and go to market. This was December, we were going out in January, and we’d already been meeting with all the buyers, the syndicators, everything was super positive. Apart from Super Size Me 2, we had a couple of other movies that we were doing, we had three or four TV shows that were moving forward, a bunch of digital series…it’s one of those things where I look back at what I’ve learned but also what we were building. I’m grateful for what we were able to do, and I’m grateful for what I’ve learned. Does it hurt sometimes? Of course, it does, but all I can do is continue to be as good a supporter of other people, of women, of men, of young filmmakers, of the people that I was really trying to champion for a long time.

DEADLINE : So you went through all this, and we’ve seen a lot of debate about whether Nate Parker, about Roman Polanski or Woody Allen can pick up their careers in spite of this unforgiving moment we are in. What’s your feeling about returning to Hollywood, and the idea of all these men being let back into the fold?

SPURLOCK : I can’t speak to anyone else except myself. All I can do is continue to do the work to become more of a person that I know I want to be. I think that it’s not going to be a short road, it’s going to take time. But listen, I love what I do. I’m hopeful that I can go from this and start doing what I love to do, that’s the most important thing for me. All I’ve ever wanted to do was be a storyteller. I hope I get to do it again.

DEADLINE: What will make Holy Chicken! a success, in your mind?

SPURLOCK : If we can bring some justice to these farmers, bring the conversation out about what happens in the industry and how they’re treated, for me that would be a great victory. I hope my investors make their money back. I mean, they did and then it got taken away, and then we’re in this great place with Goldwyn where the film’s actually coming out. I hope they get to see some ROI, and I hope the farmers get justice. For me, that’s success.

DEADLINE: Your distribution arrangement is not nearly as lucrative as the YouTube deal. How difficult was it to set that movie up after it got dropped?

SPURLOCK : It was tough. It was literally me for a year, knocking on doors and meeting with the people that I thought would be interested, and it wasn’t even until just about the year mark when I spoke to Peter Goldwyn and he said, we’d like to try and figure it out. It was tough. I met with a lot of people who said no. But this is the film business, I’m used to a lot of people saying no.

DEADLINE : You had to be surprised by the severity of the cold shoulder you encountered after that essay. Was the harsh judgment fair?

SPURLOCK : I can’t gauge whether or not it was fair. I think it was a moment in time and what happened to me was just a natural progression of the moment. I think, on the heels of what I did and what I said and when I said it, in the form in which I did it, it was almost an inevitable outcome because of where we were at that time. So I can’t fault anyone for the choices that they made. We are living in a spectacular time of change and these are great things that are happening. I just hope that I get to continue to be a part of the change in that story. Part of the reason I wrote that essay in the first place, was to be on the right side of it. I’m hopeful that in time, with the work that I do and the changes that I continue to go through, that I can be there on the right side.

Must Read Stories

Karen bass on paris-to-la28 handover; how to watch the closing ceremony.

‘It Ends With Us’ Hits $50M, ‘Deadpool’ Tops $1B WW; ‘Borderlands’ Is DOA

Joe biden on ‘cbs sunday morning’: staying in race would be “distraction”, ‘avatar’ at disneyland, more ‘moana’ coming, ‘grey’s teases season 21: latest, read more about:, subscribe to deadline.

Get our Breaking News Alerts and Keep your inbox happy.

17 Comments

Supported by

‘Super Size Me 2’ Review: Beware That ‘Healthy Chicken’

The second Morgan Spurlock cinematic dining outing takes fast food out of the fire and into the deep fryer.

Share full article

By Glenn Kenny

The activist documentarian Morgan Spurlock blended Michael Moore-style showmanship with Gen X bro appeal in his 2004 debut feature “ Super Size Me ,” a relentless examination of the fast food industry. Its main target was McDonald’s, and its big reveal was that the franchise’s food was even worse for your health than you might have imagined.

He’s back on the food chain gang here, as the title “Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken” indicates. The movie opens with a teasing montage: Not a minute has gone by before we hear a TV talking head saying of Spurlock, “Well, you know his face, you know his name, the director-producer-actor and writer of the Academy Award nominee” and so on. The news is that he’s opening his own fast food restaurant

This stunt pays off more purposefully than the movie initially gives us reason to hope for. Spurlock canvasses the country doing market research, investigating whether fast food fare has improved since his first film and making wry observations on branding. Some of this material is interesting, but most of us know that while chicken is seen as nutritious, fried chicken is another animal entirely.

The movie is at its most engaging when examining the near-monopolies controlling chicken farmers in the United States. Its portrait of one, Jonathan Buttram, who was blackballed for helping Spurlock investigate, is both poignant and infuriating. The final bad guy is, once again, predatory capitalism, adding some nasty zing to the you-are-what-you-eat implications of Spurlock’s restaurant project , which, the ending teases, may have an actual future.

Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!

Rated PG-13 for language, themes, a poultry autopsy. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes.

What To Know About Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!, The Lesser Known Sequel

Morgan Spurlock, Super Size Me 2 poster at TIFF

Morgan Spurlock, the creator of the documentary "Super Size Me," which made waves in the food and filmmaking world upon its release in 2004, passed away on May 23, 2024. The documentary tracked the filmmaker's journey consuming only McDonald's every day for one month, creating a widespread conversation that earned Spurlock and the documentary an Academy Award nomination. But "Super Size Me" had a companion sequel that tackled similar topics within the fast-food industry.

After the success of "Super Size Me," more opportunities appeared for the filmmaker, leading Spurlock to join CNN for a new original series and even create his own production company called Warrior Poets. That company then created the sequel "Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!" The sequel investigates the chicken sandwich industry as Spurlock attempts to open his own fast food restaurant, placing the focus this time on "big chicken's" impact as opposed to McDonald's. Spurlock confronts how the fast food industry made efforts to transform its reputation, challenging how many establishments began marketing their food as healthy and all-natural in an effort to give their brand image a facelift, blinding consumers once more.

Spurlock's all-in approach to making the Super Size Me sequel

Morgan Spurlock at grand opening of Holy Chicken! restaurant

Part of the conceit of "Super Size Me" was the immersive approach Spurlock took to prove his point: That fast food is doing more harm to your body than good. But for the sequel, Spurlock decided he had to go even further in an "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" experiment. With Spurlock opening his own fast-food chicken restaurant and documenting the process, he could take a deep dive into the industry by unraveling the ins and outs of how the food, specifically chicken, gets from the farm to the drive-thru.

Throughout the journey, Spurlock uncovers how expensive it is to make his chickens truly organic while exposing many corporations' slimy purposes of using health-forward terms like "free-range" and "natural" to describe their food — and unveiling how these terms may not have that much weight behind them after all. He also puts the spotlight on chicken farmers exploited by the "big chicken" industry, exposing the facade certain companies often put up to protect their image.

The long journey of bringing Super Size Me 2 to the screen

Spurlock opened his 4-day fast food chicken pop-up restaurant in Ohio in 2016. But the film had a bit of a longer journey before it would make it to the viewers' eyes. The film was initially screened at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2017, and soon after, YouTube purchased the rights to the film for distribution. However, amidst the #MeToo movement later that same year, Spurlock made a lengthy blog post confessing to a history of sexual harassment and assault incidents, exposing himself and owning up to past wrongdoings.

This confessional blog post led to YouTube pulling their funding, leaving the sequel with no distribution home. A premiere at the Sundance Film Festival was also pulled. It would take years, until 2019, for "Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!" to make it to theaters, released eventually by Samuel Goldwyn Films. Upon Spurlock's passing days after the Super Size Me anniversary , you can find the sequel on multiple streaming platforms if you're interested in Spurlock's unraveling and exposé on the "big chicken" industry.

If you or anyone you know has been a victim of sexual assault, help is available. Visit the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network website or contact RAINN's National Helpline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673).

The Definitive Voice of Entertainment News

Subscribe for full access to The Hollywood Reporter

site categories

‘super size me 2: holy chicken’: film review | tiff 2017.

Morgan Spurlock ruffles the feathers of the powerful chicken industry in 'Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!,' the follow-up to his 2004 documentary hit.

By Leslie Felperin

Leslie Felperin

Contributing Film Critic

Share on Facebook
Share to Flipboard
Send an Email
Show additional share options
Share on LinkedIn
Share on Pinterest
Share on Reddit
Share on Tumblr
Share on Whats App
Print the Article
Post a Comment

Thirteen years on from his exposé Super Size Me — the film that significantly shifted public perceptions of junk food, and especially the McDonald’s chain — documentarian Morgan Spurlock returns for a second helping with Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken! Smartly readjusting the ratios to focus less on the health effects of fast food and more on the oligopoly-run farming industry and the food trade’s sneaky marketing tactics, Spurlock goes “cluck-raking,” as it were, to expose the dark-meat side of chicken consumption by starting his own restaurant. (Promise: No more poultry puns after this.) Jaunty but thought-provoking, the doc ought to do well, although the film marketplace itself has probably changed too much in the last decade to repeat Super Size Me ’s box-office success.

THR Newsletters

More from The Hollywood Reporter

Locarno pro unveils winners of works-in-progress and co-development programs, box office milestone: ‘deadpool & wolverine’ crosses $1b globally on way to becoming top r-rated pic of all time, lively-reynolds box office domination: ‘deadpool & wolverine’ stays no. 1 with $54m, ‘it ends with us’ soars to huge $50m, margaret menegoz, ‘amour,’ ‘the white ribbon’ producer, dies at 83, aislinn clarke on irish folk horror ‘fréwaka’: “there’s a lot of trauma in ireland”, iraq-born austrian auteur kurdwin ayub keeps it provocative with ‘moon’: “i want to trigger people”.

Become a Critical Movie Critic
Movie Review Archives

Movie Review: Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken! (2017)

Vincent Gaine
Movie Reviews
--> December 8, 2019

Who fancies a chicken sandwich? Would you like it grilled? Fried? Crispy? Imagine that fresh-looking white meat, that crunchy coating, the mayonnaise and lettuce, the bun that is just moist enough without being soggy. Delicious, right? Healthier than a McDonald’s burger, surely? After viewing Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken! , the latest film from Morgan Spurlock, you may want to rethink that.

After gaining fame (and weight) for his 2004 documentary “Super Size Me,” where he showed the dangers of intense McDonald’s consumption, Spurlock now investigates the mechanics of restaurant management. A more conventional documentary maker would interview managers, staff and customers, but we expect more from Morgan. And more is what he delivers, as our presenter and director takes on the challenge of setting up a fast food restaurant. No, you read that right — he’s setting up a fast food restaurant. Spurlock’s justification is that the only way to know is to do, and do he does, renting barn space, raising chickens, converting a disused former Wendy’s into his new Holy Chicken! establishment, and along the way learns and — most importantly — shares a host of information about the foulness of dealing with fowl.

The gimmick of starting his own restaurant is an effective hook, largely trading on Spurlock’s charisma. He is a charming and engaging host, whether dealing with companies over the phone, established chicken farmers and potential staff for his restaurant, and indeed with the chickens. His scenes with the birds are particularly delightful, and highlight the lack of empathy associated with the consumption of meat. This highlighting is achieved through animations that show the passage of chickens through the industrial process, that are both amusing and terrifying all at once. Watching these sequence might prompt a viewer to consider vegetarianism, but even if not provides food (pun unintended, honest!) for thought.

The industrial process and indeed empire is the true target of the documentary. Spurlock’s attempts to contact large scale companies often encounter silence and bureaucratic runaround, best encapsulated when he calls a company, gives his name and is asked if he is Morgan Spurlock, the documentary filmmaker. Upon giving confirmation, the call is terminated. Undeterred, Spurlock digs deeper, revealing further information. Much of the material about food advertising and the regulations and requirements of the US Food and Drug Administration is disquieting but perhaps not surprising to any cynic. What appear to be assurances are rubber stamps, due to lack of government funding and therefore staffing. But a key ingredient in the continuation of such dissembling is the public willingness to accept simple labels that turn out to be little more than platitudes. Public acceptance of questionable practices are key to allowing the continuation of such practices, and Spurlock and his team are careful not to judge, only reveal. Over the course of Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken! , the truth behind “free range,” “organic,” “grilled” and other such terms are revealed, to unsettling effect that prompts an almost literal naked lunch moment. What exactly is on your plate and what do those labels mean? And how much harder would daily shopping and consumption be if we investigated the regular fare on offer?

Beyond the labeling and legalities, the surprising and in some cases quite appalling revelations concern the chicken industry of the US. Referred to as Big Chicken (creating a parallel with that other beloved corporate amalgam, Big Tobacco), the chicken industry is presented by the film as a merciless monopoly, the malevolent villain of the piece, seemingly as exploitative and downright ruthless as medical insurance (see Michael Moore’s “ Sicko ”), entertainment or politics, or for that matter, organized crime. Animal welfare may not be a corporate concern or even one for the viewer, but the scenes that depict the suffering of chicken farmers, held in what is effectively indentured servitude to their Big Chicken masters, are moving and angering. It is this aspect of Spurlock’s investigation that makes Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken! a scathing exposé, but, once again, Spurlock never displays outrage or fury. Rather, he lets the material speak for itself, and the consumer is left to decide. Pierre Takal’s editing neatly interweaves the personal journey of Spurlock and the viewer’s disturbing journey into Big Chicken, ensuring that our understanding is closely tied to our own experiences as consumers.

The film’s respect for the consumer is consistent, as when Spurlock’s restaurant opens, its unique selling point is honesty. Spurlock and his staff follow the same regulations as other fast food establishments, but use transparency rather than spin. The response of the customers is striking and the viewer might well feel like visiting Holy Chicken! themselves, despite the warnings they have received. After all, are you likely to start growing your own food? But the film’s biggest surprise comes in the end credits, which caused this reviewer’s jaw to drop. Just that is worth the viewing, but there is plenty of fascinating material beforehand.

Tagged: business , farm , food , government , restaurant

Dr. Vincent M. Gaine is a film and television researcher. His first book, Existentialism and Social Engagement in the Films of Michael Mann was published by Palgrave MacMillan in 2011. His work on film and media has been published in Cinema Journal and The Journal of Technology , Theology and Religion , as well as edited collections including The 21st Century Superhero and The Directory of World Cinema .

Movie Review: It Lives Inside (2023) Movie Review: The Inhabitant (2022) Movie Review: The Man from Rome (2022) Movie Review: The Breach (2022) Movie Review: Thor: Love and Thunder (2022) Movie Review: Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022) Movie Review: The Batman (2022)

| Log in

Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken

By Alan Ng | September 6, 2019

In 2004, Morgan Spurlock took documentary filmmaking to a whole new level by making himself the subject of an experiment by eating nothing but McDonald’s fast food for an entire month straight. Super Size Me was a wildly successful and informative documentary and has had a significant impact on the fast-food industry today…kind of, sort of.

I suppose it had to happen, but Spurlock is back with a sequel only thirteen years later in Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken . Wisely, Spurlock does not subject himself to the physical torture, he put himself through previously. This time, he decides to open his own fast-food restaurant…for real. No joke as he proudly puts his name behind it. This is not really giving the ending away, but yes…at the end of the film, a Morgan Spurlock fast food restaurant opens and Spurlock himself stands behind the product. It’s healthy, organic, affordable, and tasty. Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken documents the process from beginning to end and even stirs up a little controversy that only Morgan Spurlock can provide.

“…he decides to open his own fast-food restaurant…for real. No joke …”

The start of the documentary gives us an update about how much success Super Size Me had on the industry. It’s true that there are more “healthy” options available today and more “healthier” fast food establishments opening, but soon cynicism takes over. It appears we’ve replaced healthy food with healthy options or as it’s called in the doc—a “Health Halo.”

Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken (2019)

Directed and Written: Morgan Spurlock

Starring: Morgan Spurlock, etc.

Movie score: 8.5/10

"…we’ve replaced healthy food with healthy options..."

GOOD BYE LENIN!

This heartwarming comedy actually has the weight of history behind it as the farcical plot parallels the momentous reunification of the two Germanys. It's...

DJANGO UNCHAINED

Freed by the dentist-turned-bounty hunter, Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), former slave Django (Jamie Foxx) finds himself working across the South with...

"X-MEN" DVD RELEASE DATE ANNOUNCED

Some say it was the best movie of the summer. Others at least agree that it was the most fun. Though it is still playing in a few theaters nationwide,...

Join our Film Threat Newsletter

Dreaming of Paris? These French beauty products will take you there, starting at $10

Share this —

Watch Full Episodes
Read With Jenna
Inspirational
Relationships
TODAY Table
Newsletters
Start TODAY
Shop TODAY Awards
Citi Concert Series
Listen All Day

Follow today

More Brands

On The Show
TODAY Plaza

'Super Size Me 2' reveals some unsavory truths about the chicken industry

Is it possible to fake a healthy chicken sandwich? In "Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!" director Morgan Spurlock tackles some uncomfortable truths about fast food.

It's been 15 years since Morgan Spurlock showed the world what would happen if a person ate only McDonald's for an entire month . But the documentary filmmaker hasn't stopped investigating the fast-food world and how it's evolved since the release of the hit movie "Super Size Me."

Now, Spurlock is ruffling feathers again with his latest film, " Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken! "

In the movie, Spurlock takes a closer look at how fast food is made by participating in the process from start to finish. First, he sets up his own chicken farm to raise the chicks which will eventually supply the poultry meat used at his very own Chick-fil-A-style restaurant he calls Holy Chicken. TODAY Food spoke to Spurlock about his experience both as a chicken farmer and budding fast-food restaurateur and he revealed a few controversial ideas he wants all consumers to know before they order their next chicken sandwich.

The release of "Super Size Me 2" probably couldn't come at a more relevant time. In August, Popeyes released its first fried chicken sandwich, sparking a very heated Twitter debate among several big chains . Photos showing Popeyes customers lined up like it was Black Friday quickly went viral. Spurlock told TODAY he simply credits serendipity for the fact that his follow-up to the 2004 film is being released on the heels of so many headlines about fried chicken.

"I don’t think it’s wholly a coincidence that this is happening at the same time," Spurlock told TODAY. "I think there are going to be a lot of things pushed to the forefront in terms of 'big chicken' wanting to announce things that they’re going to do to change their chicken practices right around the time the movie comes out."

"Big chicken" refers to the nation's top chicken producers like Tysons and Pilgrim's and, by extension, the companies they supply, like McDonald's.

Food Is organic chicken really better for you? A nutritionist weighs in

But the film's first release was mired in controversy. In 2017, Spurlock preemptively and publicly admitted to past sexual misconduct . "Super Size Me 2," which had premiered in a few international markets, was swiftly dropped by Google, which had planned to release it on YouTube Premium's predecessor, YouTube Red. The film was also dropped from Sundance in 2018 and Spurlock stepped away from his production company.

Now the film is being released in the U.S. by Samuel Goldwyn Films , the company behind Spurlock's first "Super Size Me." A representative for the film company declined to comment to TODAY when asked why they decided to buy the film after Google dropped it.

Spurlock also declined to comment about why he decided to go speak out in 2017 but told The Washington Post he didn't want his previous transgressions to take away from the message of the new film. “All I can do is have faith that every day I can continue to be the best person I can and translate that to the work I believe in, which is telling stories that make a difference," he said.

After stepping away from the spotlight, Spurlock now hopes his latest film will inspire people to take a closer look at where their food is coming from and, perhaps, inspire industry-wide change.

Food labels are incredibly misleading

The two primary reasons Spurlock chose to investigate the chicken industry are simple.

For starters, chicken is the most widely consumed animal on the planet. "We eat 50 billion chickens worldwide every year," explained Spurlock, who said this explosion is partially due to the fact that many people think it's the healthiest protein. While chicken meat consumed in moderation is a great source of protein, deep-fried poultry of any kind will never win a health award. "Simultaneously, I thought, better burger places already exist."

"Also, I didn’t have the money to start a cattle farm," he said candidly.

With the help of Alabama-based chicken farmers Jonathan and Zack Buttram, Spurlock starts his own poultry farming operation and learns about the chicken industry monopolies that comprise "big chicken."

He blames this bureaucracy (which he calls "corrupt") for what he calls the greatest chicken myth: We think we're eating something that's better for us than it actually is. For example, in "Super Size Me 2" viewers learn that all it takes for a chicken to be labeled as "free range" means that it has access to a tiny space outside — not that it actually roams outdoors all day.

Morgan Spurlock and his new flock of baby chicks

During a scene in the movie where he's tending chickens on the farm, Spurlock simply opens a barn door and fences in a small, grassless patch of land. Do any of the chickens go outside into the fresh air? No. In fact, he has to chase them to get them remotely close to the door. Not only is it too hot for the birds, but they're so large that they don't really have a desire to be that active. And if Spurlock had fed the chickens organic feed (feed made without genetically modified ingredients, like corn), they would be considered organic, despite the fact they never step outside or eat anything wild.

"We think the birds are being raised in better conditions than they are," said Spurlock, who added that he believes the current USDA labeling approval process is terribly misleading for consumers . "Nobody is looking out for you as a consumer because the people who are now running these governmental agencies are people who came from the chicken companies."

Chickens aren't the only ones getting mistreated

Morgan Spurlock speaks with Jonathan Buttram, a chicken farmer in Alabama

The most shocking thing Spurlock said he learned about the chicken industry wasn't how chickens are treated. It's how farmers are mistreated.

"The worst thing that comes out of this movie is how they (chicken companies) treat the farmers," said Spurlock. "These people are the backbone of feeding our country and you’ve never seen people get more used, abused and mistreated than these farmers by these corporations."

The majority of America's chickens come from farmers who are under contract with larger companies. Every few weeks, these farmers get a new flock of birds to raise. Farmers are paid via a “tournament system" which pits growers against each other to produce more pounds of meat per feed supplied.

But it isn't just the farmers who are suffering, said Spurlock. Flocks aren't faring that well either.

"Today's chickens are so big they can barely walk by the time they go to slaughter," explained the filmmaker. "It used to take months to get a chicken to full maturity, but now it's being done in six weeks." Mature chickens weigh about 6.5 pounds. That's a shocking amount of weight to gain in less than two months.

Contrary to popular belief, this larger-than-life scientific miracle isn't due to hormone injections or steroid usage. It's largely due to years of selective cross breeding. Labeling chicken or eggs as free of hormones is a total marketing ploy since the USDA has prohibited the use of all hormones and steroids in any chicken products since the 1950s. (Hormones are still used legally in beef production.)

Why is the fried chicken sandwich so popular now ?

Morgan Spurlock opening his fast food restaurant, Holy Chicken!

It's pretty clear that fried chicken is the new burger patty ... at least for now, said Spurlock.

"There is this big push right now to become the Five Guys or Shake Shack or In-N-Out of chicken sandwiches," claims Spurlock. He said he sees a very public and aggressive race between restaurants wanting to corner that specific marketplace this year.

"Because of this movie, the world might be ready for the greatest grilled crispy chicken sandwich," he said. Crispy and grilled? The signature item on Spurlock's menu is actually a fried sandwich. But, to make it appear healthier, food stylists paint grill marks on top of the breading to mimic the look of something that seems better for us nutritionally. The sandwich itself is symbolic of what Spurlock and food industry experts call the "health halo" which surrounds a variety of foods being offered up by big companies these days.

Food Who has the best chicken sandwich? Chick-fil-A and Popeyes start hilarious Twitter feud

At the end of the film, Spurlock's Holy Chicken pop-up restaurant opens in Ohio to much fanfare. Customers are greeted by a wall that explains the chickens' real journey, from hatchery to farm to fast-food table. Phrases such as “all natural,” "goodness" and “local” are boldly displayed along with the truth: “Not sure what all these words actually mean? Great! Because, legally speaking, they don’t mean much.”

"The best part about Holy Chicken is it's the one place that gives you exactly what you want — a great delicious grilled crispy sandwich," said Spurlock. "But we also give you want you need, which is an education into the food system."

"Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!" hits theaters nationwide Sept. 13 and is now available to stream through on-demand services like iTunes and Amazon Prime Video.

Everyone is eating cucumber salad right now because of this one TikToker

I tried Olympic chocolate muffin dupe recipes — and this one got the gold

Grocery store tourism takes off as supermarkets become travel destinations

Egg flights are the ‘girl dinner’ of the moment

Simone Biles has thoughts on the Olympic Village’s controversial food

Italian Olympic gymnast Giorgia Villa goes viral for Parmigiano-Reggiano sponsorship: ‘Get that cheese girl’

‘The only Olympic Village love story that matters’ is about a Norwegian swimmer and his chocolate muffins

The Olympic Village food reviews are in, and they’re … not great

Paris Olympics aren’t serving alcohol to fans — and Americans are dumbfounded

Viral video reignites debate: Can you wash fruits and vegetables in the dishwasher?

Toronto Film Review: ‘Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!’

Morgan Spurlock creates his own fast-food chicken restaurant in a sequel about how fast food now poses as healthy (but it ain't!).

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

Chief Film Critic

‘It Ends with Us’ Review: Blake Lively Stars in a Romantic Soap Opera That Turns Dark and Stays Convincing 4 days ago
‘Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes’ Review: Nanette Burstein’s HBO Documentary Reveals How Elizabeth Taylor’s Life Became a Parable 5 days ago
‘Trap’ Review: Josh Hartnett Plays a Serial Killer in an M. Night Shyamalan Thriller Where Each Twist Is More Contrived Than the Last 1 week ago

Is fast food good for you? The answer is obvious, to the point that the question sounds insane, and one reason it’s obvious is that Morgan Spurlock ’s “Super Size Me,” back in 2004, colored in the answer in a highly entertaining and informative way. Spurlock’s 30-day-McDonald’s-binge documentary was an experiment that took the form of a gluttonous fantasy ( what would it be like to pig out on McDonald’s every day? ), and it demonstrated what any halfway informed person already knew: that fast food, as good as it tastes, is bad for your heart and (maybe) your soul — that it makes you fat, sluggish, and demonstrably unhealthy.

So what’s left for Spurlock to demonstrate in “ Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken! “? A lot more than you’d expect. As it turns out, the reality of fast food — that it’s succulent addictive junk — is now competing with a counter-myth: that it’s all a lot healthier than it used to be. And one of the reasons it’s competing with that myth is because of “Super Size Me.” Spurlock’s film turned the spotlight on what’s actually going on in your body when you eat a hamburger and fries at McDonald’s. And so the McDonald’s corporation, like any shrewd company, got busy.

Popular on Variety

“Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!” is Spurlock’s attempt to rectify that situation. Yet it’s now clear, more than it was then, that he may be fighting a borderline impossible battle. “Super Size Me 2” is built around what’s meant to be another irresistible what-if-I-did-this? logistical culinary stunt. Playing off the notion that sometimes the only way to solve a problem “is to become a part of that problem,” Spurlock decides to open his own fast-food restaurant. In theory, it’s a fun idea, and it gives Spurlock a hooky way to demonstrate how the sausage — or, in this case, the chicken sandwich with the grill stripes literally painted on — gets made.

He builds his one-shot franchise outlet from the ground up, and each step along the way provides another McNugget of a lesson for the audience in how the fast food we crave actually gets created. First off, Spurlock buys an independent hatchery in Alabama, demonstrating in the process that 99 percent of America’s chicken farms are owned by what he calls Big Chicken: the five vertically integrated corporations (Tyson, Perdue, etc.) that control the industry. He calls his hatchery “Morganic Farms,” but he can’t make his chickens organic, because that’s too expensive. And when it comes to the issue of whether they’ll be free-range or not, he learns that the industry definition of “free-range” — a term that makes a lot of us feel both humane and hungry — is more slippery than we thought.

Spurlock’s chickens are massed inside, under less horrific conditions than some of the guerrilla footage of chicken farms has revealed over the last decade. But as long as they’re given the theoretical option of stepping outside (in this case, into an area of about four square feet), that counts as “free-range.” Grilled chicken is healthier than fried chicken, but Spurlock interviews consumers who salivate at the thought of anything fried and turn up their nose at grilled for being boring. So he comes up with a “healthy” gimmick: He will make a chicken patty that’s grilled and fried, giving his customers the best of both worlds.

Beyond that, he investigates the use of the tantalizing words that fast-food corporations now ritually employ to seduce you into thinking that the food they’re marketing is healthy. On the menus, they bombard the customer with words like “fresh,” “natural,” “no additives,” “made from scratch,” and the substitution of the light-and-tasty-sounding “crispy” for the dreaded old-school “fried.” Throw in a salad or two, and America, from what the film shows us, is now convinced that what it’s eating somehow isn’t an orgy of utterly non-nutritious and processed-to-within-an-inch-of-its-life fake food.

As Spurlock learns, all those meaningless words — and the new plain brown “environmental” wrappers — create something that the fast-food industry calls a “health halo.” It’s an aura of being good for you. Spurlock, like McDonald’s, paints a bunch of those words and slogans on the walls of his restaurant — a former Wendy’s along a fast-food strip of Columbus, Ohio, that he refurbishes with nice bright green-and-white colors. The whole launch of his restaurant isn’t serious, it’s a piece of conceptual satire: a sham-healthy experience. But the local public buys it.

Spurlock, with slightly thinner hair than he had in “Super Size Me,” is still the same funny and ebullient documentary host in his trademark hipster-handlebar mustache, and he remains an engagingly non-hectoring crusader. “Super Size Me 2” is half a good movie, because it teaches you something. But maybe not enough. Spurlock, as instrumental as he has been in putting these issues on the table, doesn’t seem to fully get what his own movie is about.

He spends a lot of the film’s time — too much of it — on his chicken farm, because he knows that the sight of Morgan Spurlock running his own little mass-produced poultry industry makes for good visual theater. He also captures the plight of farmers who are treated like indentured servants by Big Chicken. Yet the ultimate subject of “Super Size Me 2” isn’t chicken farming; it’s advertising. It’s the Orwellian counter-reality that fast-food companies are now selling us. And Spurlock would have done well to get a glimpse behind the curtain and show us how more of that gets created.

In the 13 years since “Super Size Me,” we’ve seen the rise of a veritable cottage industry of documentary food exposés that spotlight what it really is that we’re eating every day. The most brilliant and mind-boggling of those films is Robert Kenner’s “Food, Inc.” (2008), which was essentially the documentary version of Eric Schlosser’s “Fast Food Nation.” It made the extraordinary point that the processed food that constitutes the overwhelming bulk of most people’s diets is made with techniques that were pioneered by the fast-food industry. What we’re eating is, in essence, an illusion (corn syrup and chemicals pretending to be spaghetti sauce, etc.). “Super Size Me,” like “Food, Inc.,” was in its catchy way bringing the news, but “Super Size Me 2” is now just one more chapter in a genre that Spurlock helped create. It has its amusing (and enlightening) moments, but in many ways it’s just dancing around the meat of the matter.

Reviewed at Toronto Film Festival (TIFF Docs), Sept. 8, 2017. Running time: 103 MIN.

Production: (USA) A Warrior Poets, Snoot Entertainment, Public Domain production. Producers: Keith Calder, Morgan Spurlock, Jeremy Chilnick, Matthew Galkin, Spencer Silna, Jessica Calder, Nicole Barton.
Crew: Director: Morgan Spurlock. Screenplay: Morgan Spurlock, Jeremy Chilnick. Camera (color, widescreen): David Vlasits. Editor: Pierre Takal.
With: Morgan Spurlock, Jonathan Buttram.

More from Variety

Luminate streaming ratings: ‘a good girl’s guide to murder’ leads though tv viewership remains slow august 2-8, hollywood must define ai technical standards to prep for its future , ‘incredibles 3’ in development with brad bird at pixar, imane khelif wins olympic boxing gold medal, triumphs over battles both in and out of the ring, youtube, tiktok eroding viewing time spent streaming tv & movies, pixar’s ‘elio’ adds zoe saldana, more from our brands, billie eilish, red hot chili peppers, snoop dogg to perform at paris olympics closing ceremony, this new show at monterey celebrates cars and hip-hop, la28 boss inspired by paris games, but still chasing sponsor target, the best loofahs and body scrubbers, according to dermatologists, the drew carey show is streaming for the very first time — find out where.

Cast & crew
User reviews

Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!

Morgan Spurlock reignites his battle with the food industry - this time from behind the register - as he opens his own fast food restaurant. Morgan Spurlock reignites his battle with the food industry - this time from behind the register - as he opens his own fast food restaurant. Morgan Spurlock reignites his battle with the food industry - this time from behind the register - as he opens his own fast food restaurant.

Morgan Spurlock
Jeremy Chilnick
Richard Kirshenbaum
Danny Meyer
47 User reviews
16 Critic reviews
61 Metascore
1 nomination

Top cast 34

Self - CEO, NSG …

Self - Restaurateur

Self - Chef …

Self - Food Trend Expert
Self - Brand Strategy Consultant

Self - Brand Strategy Expert

Self - Trend Specialist, CCD Innovation

Self - CEO & Principal, CCD Innovation

Self - President, Murray McMurray Hatchery

Self - Poultry Farmer

Self - Chief Insights Officer, Techomic Inc

Self - Founder, CCD Innovation

Self - Chef, CCD Innovation

Self - Food Scientist, CCD Innovation

Self - Partner, NSG …

All cast & crew
Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

More like this

Did you know

Trivia The restaurant was open for four days in 2016 at a former Wendy's restaurant in Columbus, Ohio. As of Dec. 2019 the site remains vacant.
Goofs The movie was made in 2016 but inside the restaurant there are posters comparing chicken sizes between the year 2000 and 2019.

Morgan Spurlock : [Repeated line to customers] Honesty never tasted so fresh

Connections Features Super Size Me (2004)
Soundtracks Nothing But Chickens Written by Jeff Meegan and David Tobin and Tim Garland Performed by Ray Gelato, Jeff Meegan, David Tobin, Tim Garland

User reviews 47

AP_FORTYSEVEN
Dec 11, 2020
How long is Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!? Powered by Alexa
September 13, 2019 (United States)
United States
Super Size Me 2
2405 Schrock Rd, Columbus, Ohio, USA (location)
Public Domain
Snoot Entertainment
Warrior Poets
See more company credits at IMDbPro

Technical specs

Runtime 1 hour 33 minutes

More to explore

More selected projects

Space explorers executive producer/morgan spurlock presents, springfield of dreams: the legend of homer simpson writer/director, cultureshock television, super size me2: holy chicken writer/director, tough guys executive producer/morgan spurlock presents, superheroes decoded television, no man’s land film, i hart food television, the untold story of lightning mcqueen branded, present tense with jillian rose reed digital, the halo effect television, rats writer/director, fueled by bullshit branded, crafted branded, focus forward branded, failure club digital, losing it with john stamos digital, we the economy digital, consider the source digital, in a galaxy digital, 30 days television, 7 deadly sins television, dark horse nation television, american takedown television, inside man television, the eagle huntress executive producer/morgan spurlock presents, chalk executive producer/morgan spurlock presents, czech dream executive producer/morgan spurlock presents:, the third wave executive producer/morgan spurlock presents:, what would jesus buy executive producer/morgan spurlock presents:, committed executive producer/morgan spurlock presents, the other f word executive producer/morgan spurlock presents, a brony tale executive producer/morgan spurlock presents, waiting for mamu executive producer/morgan spurlock presents, censored voices executive producer/morgan spurlock presents, i am santa claus executive producer/morgan spurlock presents, morgan spurlock presents: freedom the movie executive producer/morgan spurlock presents, pistol shrimps executive producer/morgan spurlock presents, vlogumentary executive producer/morgan spurlock presents, super size me writer/director, where in the world is osama bin laden writer/ director, the simpsons 20th anniversary special writer/director, freakonomics writer/director, the greatest movie ever sold writer/director, the dotted line writer/director, comic-con episode iv: a fan’s hope writer/director, mansome writer/director, one direction: this is us writer/director, super size me2: holy chicken, super size me 2: holy chicken.

Muckraking filmmaker Morgan Spurlock reignites his battle with the food industry — this time from behind the register — as he opens his own fast food restaurant.

Single Edit
Column Edit

Morgan Spurlock Storyteller.

Contact About Projects

Common Sense Media

Movie & TV reviews for parents

For Parents
For Educators
Our Work and Impact

Or browse by category:

Get the app
Movie Reviews
Best Movie Lists
Best Movies on Netflix, Disney+, and More

Common Sense Selections for Movies

50 Modern Movies All Kids Should Watch Before They're 12

Best TV Lists
Best TV Shows on Netflix, Disney+, and More
Common Sense Selections for TV
Video Reviews of TV Shows

Best Kids' Shows on Disney+

Best Kids' TV Shows on Netflix

Book Reviews
Best Book Lists
Common Sense Selections for Books

8 Tips for Getting Kids Hooked on Books

50 Books All Kids Should Read Before They're 12

Game Reviews
Best Game Lists

Common Sense Selections for Games

Video Reviews of Games

Nintendo Switch Games for Family Fun

Podcast Reviews
Best Podcast Lists

Common Sense Selections for Podcasts

Parents' Guide to Podcasts

App Reviews
Best App Lists

Social Networking for Teens

Gun-Free Action Game Apps

Reviews for AI Apps and Tools

YouTube Channel Reviews
YouTube Kids Channels by Topic

Parents' Ultimate Guide to YouTube Kids

How to Prepare Your Kids for School After a Summer of Screen Time

Family Tech Planners
Digital Skills
All Articles
Latino Culture
Black Voices
Asian Stories
Native Narratives
LGBTQ+ Pride
Best of Diverse Representation List

Multicultural Books

YouTube Channels with Diverse Representations

Podcasts with Diverse Characters and Stories

Super size me 2: holy chicken, common sense media reviewers.

Revealing fast-food docu has some language, animal violence.

Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken! Poster Image

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Know what you're eating, and learn how your food i

Spurlock investigates unfair practices of a major

Violence to chicks and chickens, which are bred to

Infrequent use of words including "bastards," "f--

Lots of brands are seen/discussed, though many are

The film paints fast food, particularly fried fast

Positive Messages

Know what you're eating, and learn how your food is raised, processed, and prepared. Don't be influenced by false advertising about "healthy" food. Don't engage in unfair practices -- and call out employers for doing so.

Positive Role Models

Spurlock investigates unfair practices of a major industry in America and has defendants in a lawsuit against a big corporation speak about their experiences on camera. The chicken farmers he interviews appear to be honest people who are trying to make a decent living. Spurlock opens a restaurant that promises truth and transparency about its food. Americans appear to willfully ignore important information about food that affects their health.

Violence & Scariness

Violence to chicks and chickens, which are bred to quickly grow too fat to walk or sprout enough feathers to cover their girth. They're tossed around, vaccinated by a machine with a long needle, killed by being stepped on, prone to breeding-induced heart attacks and broken bones, given autopsies, sent to slaughter at the end of their six-week life.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Infrequent use of words including "bastards," "f--king," "bulls--t," "s--t."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Lots of brands are seen/discussed, though many are definitely in nonpromotional/unflattering context. Fast-food chains are named and/or visited, including Chick-fil-A, McDonald's, Burger King, Wendy's, Chipotle, Panera, Taco Bell, Papa John's, White Castle, Bubba Gump, fresh&co, Boston Market, Subway. Corporate chicken growers are discussed, including Tyson, Purdue, Koch Foods, Pilgrim's, Sanderson Farms. Spurlock names companies he visits or calls, including banks, creative agencies, innovation labs, law firms. He deals with USDA, Animal Welfare Institute, National Chicken Council, among others.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

The film paints fast food, particularly fried fast food, like a drug that's both unhealthy and apparently addictive for Americans, who seem unable or unwilling to cut back.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken! has less of a gross-out factor than its predecessor but still serves as an eye-opener about the food, especially chicken, that Americans consume. It's more appropriate, content-wise, for younger viewers who are interested in the topic than other industry exposés, like Food, Inc. or Fast Food Nation . Director Morgan Spurlock exposes the false advertising behind most "healthy" fast food and taste-tests a range of chicken products on the current fast-food market. He also buys and raises his own chickens, a process that involves chicks being thrown around and shot with a long vaccination needle and chickens dying from being stepped on, having heart attacks (discovered in an autopsy scene), and getting sent to slaughter. Profit-seeking corporations come off as untrustworthy. Language includes infrequent use of words including "bastards," "f--king," "bulls--t," etc. -- in this documentary, the "F" word' is "fried." To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Community Reviews

Parents say
Kids say (4)

There aren't any parent reviews yet. Be the first to review this title.

What's the Story?

Best known for Super Size Me -- the 2004 documentary in which he tracked his own physical decline from eating a steady diet of fast food -- Morgan Spurlock returns in SUPER SIZE ME 2: HOLY CHICKEN! to explore Americans' unhealthy obsession with chicken. Planning to open his own fast-food chain promising healthy food and authentic advertising, Spurlock consults a series of chefs, advertising executives, storytelling experts, and brand strategists. Through them, he learns how much work and planning goes into creating the perception -- though not the reality -- of "healthy" food. Spurlock buys thousands of his own chickens to raise, an enterprise that exposes selective breeding practices of chickens that grow faster and fatter every year (and, as a result, die more regularly from heart attacks and broken hips). In the final scenes, Spurlock opens a restaurant that's entirely upfront, in an unexpected way, about the food it's serving.

Is It Any Good?

This film won't disappoint fans of Spurlock's first documentary, and his decade-plus of professional evolution between the two movies shows on screen. If you've been eager to see Spurlock step foot in a McDonald's again, this is your chance. Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken! is both entertaining and revealing, balancing the documentarian's exposé of the food industry's dishonest practices with a storyteller's gift for making emotional connections. The film keeps a brisk pace from beginning to end, with only a slight lull as Spurlock detours into a series of interviews concerning a lawsuit against the Tyson corporation. Still, he clearly knows when to speed things up, as with lively animated sequences, or slow them down, like an extended scene of chicks hatching to music from The Nutcracker .

Some of the food chains, corporations, and organizations that Spurlock visits won't be too happy with how they're portrayed here; Spurlock borrows from Michael Moore in his occasionally confrontational style. But he does a great job of eliciting potentially shocking information from people without overreacting in the moment. Spurlock fits in as well with Alabama chicken farmers as he does with urban ad executives, and he exploits his own celebrity in publicizing his new venture. The film reveals how easily Americans have been duped by the false "healthy halo" that food companies painstakingly craft through misleading words ("natural," "artisanal"), incomplete information ("free range," "hormone free"), and engineered experiences (manipulative decor, advertising).

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about whether Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken! will change their own attitudes toward buying and eating chicken or fast food. Who is responsible for America's health/obesity crisis? What should we do about it?

Were you left with any unanswered questions about chicken farming or the fate of Spurlock's restaurant?

Spurlock wonders whether anything has actually changed in the quality of fast food in the years since he filmed Super Size Me. Does the answer surprise you?

Have you seen other documentaries that investigate the industrial food complex? How do they compare with this one?

Movie Details

In theaters : September 6, 2019
On DVD or streaming : November 5, 2019
Cast : Morgan Spurlock , Jonathan Buttram
Director : Morgan Spurlock
Studio : Samuel Goldwyn Films
Genre : Documentary
Topics : Activism , Cooking and Baking , Horses and Farm Animals
Run time : 93 minutes
MPAA rating : PG-13
MPAA explanation : brief strong language
Last updated : October 15, 2023

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

Suggest an Update

Our editors recommend.

Super Size Me

Want personalized picks for your kids' age and interests?

Fast Food Nation

What's on Your Plate?

Best Documentaries

Best animal documentaries, related topics.

Cooking and Baking
Horses and Farm Animals

Want suggestions based on your streaming services? Get personalized recommendations

Common Sense Media's unbiased ratings are created by expert reviewers and aren't influenced by the product's creators or by any of our funders, affiliates, or partners.

Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken! Documentary Questions with Answers

Word Document File

Description

Microsoft Office document with 20 questions that go along with the Super Size Me 2 documentary. The documentary streams for free on many websites. Great for extra credit or to show the day before a break. You can edit the questions to accommodate your needs and the answers are at the end of the document.

Questions & Answers

Shanaz baksh.

We're hiring
Help & FAQ
Privacy policy
Student privacy
Terms of service
Tell us what you think

IMAGES

SUPER SIZE ME 2 HOLY CHICKEN .pdf
Super Size Me 2 : Holy Chicken !
Supersize Me 2: Holy Chicken Project by The ELA Hour
The Film "Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!"
Super Size Me 2 Holy Chicken Worksheet
Holy Chicken: Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken! • Ads of the World™

COMMENTS

The Film "Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!"
Get a custom essay on The Film "Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!": How the Fast Food Industry Interacts With Its Customers. The efforts that fast food chains make to represent themselves as sustainable and health-oriented have been perceived as questionable, at best, up until recently, when the introduction of innovative tools has allowed ...
The Film "Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!"
Through the film "Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!", the fast food industry is thoroughly explored. Morgan Spurlock unveils the inner workings of this industry by showcasing the various stages involved in chicken production, from raising chickens on factory farms to the final processed products served in fast food restaurants.
Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken! movie review (2019)
Powered by JustWatch. "Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!" sat on the shelf for two years after its director-star Morgan Spurlock admitted to sexual harassment in a New York Times article. If I hadn't known that, the timing of this film's release would have seemed a bit too perfect. America is currently flipping out over the (admittedly ...
Morgan Spurlock Super Size Me Lessons Learned from trip Down #MeToo
For Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!, Spurlock takes on the guise of a chicken grower to illustrate lies that make consumers believe they are eating healthy when they aren't, and exposes how the ...
'Super Size Me 2' Review: Beware That 'Healthy Chicken'
The activist documentarian Morgan Spurlock blended Michael Moore-style showmanship with Gen X bro appeal in his 2004 debut feature " Super Size Me ," a relentless examination of the fast food ...
What To Know About Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!, The Lesser Known
It would take years, until 2019, for "Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!" to make it to theaters, released eventually by Samuel Goldwyn Films. Upon Spurlock's passing days after the Super Size Me anniversary, you can find the sequel on multiple streaming platforms if you're interested in Spurlock's unraveling and exposé on the "big chicken" industry.
'Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!' Review
Morgan Spurlock ruffles the feathers of the powerful chicken industry in 'Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!,' the follow-up to his 2004 documentary hit.
Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!
English. Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken! is a 2017 American documentary film directed by Morgan Spurlock. A sequel to the 2004 film Super Size Me, it explores ways in which the fast food industry has rebranded itself as healthier since his original film through the process of Spurlock working to open his own fast-food restaurant, thus exposing ...
Movie Review: Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken! (2017)
After viewing Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!, the latest film from Morgan Spurlock, you may want to rethink that. After gaining fame (and weight) for his 2004 documentary "Super Size Me," where he showed the dangers of intense McDonald's consumption, Spurlock now investigates the mechanics of restaurant management. A more conventional ...
Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken
Super Size Me was a wildly successful and informative documentary and has had a significant impact on the fast-food industry today…kind of, sort of. I suppose it had to happen, but Spurlock is back with a sequel only thirteen years later in Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken. Wisely, Spurlock does not subject himself to the physical torture, he ...
'Super Size Me 2' reveals some unsavory truths about the ...
The release of "Super Size Me 2" probably couldn't come at a more relevant time. In August, Popeyes released its first fried chicken sandwich, sparking a very heated Twitter debate among several ...
Toronto Film Review: 'Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!'
Spurlock, like McDonald's, paints a bunch of those words and slogans on the walls of his restaurant — a former Wendy's along a fast-food strip of Columbus, Ohio, that he refurbishes with ...
Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken! (2017)
Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!: Directed by Morgan Spurlock. With Morgan Spurlock, Richard Kirshenbaum, Danny Meyer, Bobby Flay. Morgan Spurlock reignites his battle with the food industry - this time from behind the register - as he opens his own fast food restaurant.
Morgan Spurlock › Super Size Me2: Holy Chicken!
Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken! Muckraking filmmaker Morgan Spurlock reignites his battle with the food industry — this time from behind the register — as he opens his own fast food restaurant.. More selected projects. Space Explorers Executive Producer/Morgan Spurlock Presents.
Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!
Parents need to know that Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!has less of a gross-out factor than its predecessor but still serves as an eye-opener about the food, especially chicken, that Americans consume. It's more appropriate, content-wise, for younger viewers who are interested in the topic than other industry exposés, like Food, Inc. or Fast Food Nation.
'Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!' review: Morgan Spurlock's sequel will
Morgan Spurlock's "Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!" has languished for nearly two years, having been shelved after the director's disclosure of "past indiscretions." Yet the sequel to ...
Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!
Movie Forums - Exactly what it sounds like. Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken Documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock, who turned the art of documentary making on its ear with his 2004 Oscar-nominated film Super Size Me, takes a slightly different tack with his 2017 sequel Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken, that offers another laid bare look at another facet of the fast food industry that doesn't ...
SuperSize Me 2 HW.docx
SuperSize Me 2: Holy Chicken Homework 03/17/20 AGBM497 Sara Agip 1. The whole purpose of this movie/documentary is that Spurlock wanted to prove consumers that there is another side to this whole scenario of fast food eating. When the first super- size me movie came out, he left consumers in far great denial of the toxic qualities of fast food than ever before.
Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken Movie Guide/Worksheet
Writing-essays. ELA test prep. High school ELA. Literature. Informational text. Writing. Creative writing. ... Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken Movie Guide/Worksheet. Rated 5 out of 5, based on 1 reviews. 5.0 ... 2 hours. Tags. Worksheets. Movie Guides. Report this resource to TPT.
Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!
Muckraking filmmaker Morgan Spurlock reignites his battle with the food industry - this time with Big Chicken - as he opens his own fast food restaurant.
Unveiling the Truth Behind Fast Food Industry Marketing
The Film "Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!": How the Fast Food Industry Interacts With Its Customers Essay The concept of fast food has always been taken with a grain of salt since the first fast food outlet was opened. However, despite the low value of fast food, people are still willing to consume it, which can be attributed to the sophisticated marketing strategies and the companies ...
Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken! Documentary Questions with Answers
Description. Microsoft Office document with 20 questions that go along with the Super Size Me 2 documentary. The documentary streams for free on many websites. Great for extra credit or to show the day before a break. You can edit the questions to accommodate your needs and the answers are at the end of the document. Total Pages. 4 pages.

The Film “Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!”: How the Fast Food Industry Interacts With Its Customers Essay

The Film "Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!"

2. History of Fast Food Industry

3. The Film "Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!"

3.1. Overview of the Film

3.2. Exploring the Fast Food Industry

3.3. Impact on Consumer Behavior

3.4. Ethical and Social Implications

3.5. Conclusion

Related articles

The Impact of Del Petro Leo's Innovations on the Global Oil Industry

The Impact of Social Media Marketing on Brand Promotion and Consumer Behavior

The Impact of Cultural Diversity on Business Strategy and Promotion in New York (NY)

Analyzing the Effectiveness of Structured Interviews in the Hiring Process

The Impact of AI Marketing on Consumer Behavior and Business Strategies

El impacto de la logística y la tecnología en la eficiencia de la cadena de suministro

The Impact of Advertising and Promotion on Consumer Behavior in New York City

Movie Reviews

Odie Henderson

Now playing

Peyton Robinson

Brian Tallerico

Dirty Pop: The Boy Band Scam

Crumb Catcher

Space Cadet

Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken! (2019)

Latest blog posts

The Fairy Tale Shoes: Interview With the Cast and Crew of Cuckoo

On the Trail: India Donaldson on Good One

The Texture of Night: How Collateral Revolutionized Movies

SDCC 2024: Activations, Apes and Other Animals

site categories

Mike Fleming Jr

More Stories By Mike

Related Stories

2024 Premiere Dates For New & Returning Series On Broadcast, Cable & Streaming

'The Frog' Teaser: Mysterious Guests Disturb The Peace In Netflix Korea Series

Watch on Deadline

Must Read Stories

‘It Ends With Us’ Hits $50M, ‘Deadpool’ Tops $1B WW; ‘Borderlands’ Is DOA

17 Comments

‘Super Size Me 2’ Review: Beware That ‘Healthy Chicken’

What To Know About Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!, The Lesser Known Sequel

Spurlock's all-in approach to making the Super Size Me sequel

The long journey of bringing Super Size Me 2 to the screen

The Definitive Voice of Entertainment News

site categories

Leslie Felperin

Related Stories

THR Newsletters

More from The Hollywood Reporter

Movie Review: Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken! (2017)

Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

GOOD BYE LENIN!

DJANGO UNCHAINED

"X-MEN" DVD RELEASE DATE ANNOUNCED

Join our Film Threat Newsletter

'Super Size Me 2' reveals some unsavory truths about the chicken industry

Food Is organic chicken really better for you? A nutritionist weighs in

Food labels are incredibly misleading

Chickens aren't the only ones getting mistreated

Why is the fried chicken sandwich so popular now ?

Food Who has the best chicken sandwich? Chick-fil-A and Popeyes start hilarious Twitter feud

Everyone is eating cucumber salad right now because of this one TikToker

I tried Olympic chocolate muffin dupe recipes — and this one got the gold

Grocery store tourism takes off as supermarkets become travel destinations

Egg flights are the ‘girl dinner’ of the moment

Simone Biles has thoughts on the Olympic Village’s controversial food

Italian Olympic gymnast Giorgia Villa goes viral for Parmigiano-Reggiano sponsorship: ‘Get that cheese girl’

‘The only Olympic Village love story that matters’ is about a Norwegian swimmer and his chocolate muffins

The Olympic Village food reviews are in, and they’re … not great

Paris Olympics aren’t serving alcohol to fans — and Americans are dumbfounded

Viral video reignites debate: Can you wash fruits and vegetables in the dishwasher?

Toronto Film Review: ‘Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!’

Owen Gleiberman

Related Stories

Popular on Variety

Reviewed at Toronto Film Festival (TIFF Docs), Sept. 8, 2017. Running time: 103 MIN.

More from Variety