“There is only one Batman in the world”: When a Turkish province filed a lawsuit against Christopher Nolan
It would take an exhaustive search to find anyone on the planet who doesn’t know who Batman is. Still, Christopher Nolan ended up being subjected to unusual legal action because there weren’t many people where Batman actually was.
When the name is brought up, it’s entirely fair for the mind to instantly wander towards the comic book creation, iconic superhero, and pop culture monolith. He has reigned as one of the jewels in the crown of DC Comics since first appearing on the printed page back in 1939.
However, there’s also the city of Batman in Turkey, which serves as the capital of the Batman District in Batman Province. When Bob Kane and Bill Finger first created Bruce Wayne’s costumed alter-ego, it was little more than a village of several thousand people. Later, its population exploded and became important upon the discovery of its oil fields.
It wasn’t officially renamed as Batman until 1957 – almost two decades after the ‘Caped Crusader’ made his comic book debut – but now houses almost half a million people due to its proximity to the Bati Raman oil field, the largest in Turkey. Still, it wasn’t until The Dark Knight grossed north of a billion dollars at the global box office that the incumbent mayor decided he wanted a piece of the pie.
Hüseyin Kalkan berated the Nolan-directed franchise for the way “the American producers used the name of our city without informing us,” reiterating that “there is only one Batman in the world”. It wasn’t the nocturnal vigilante being played on the big screen by Christian Bale in the massively influential trilogy.
Of course, the biggest question was why Kalkan – or any local resident, for that matter – had waited until the mid-2000s to share their discontent. After all, by that point, Batman had appeared in hundreds upon hundreds of comic books, movies directed by Tim Burton and Joel Schumacher, Adam West’s kitsch classic TV series, a slew of animated offshoots, and video games, as well as more merchandise than it’s humanly possible to shake a stick at.
Kalkan would further outline the difficulties business owners faced in establishing their prospective means of employment, based solely on trying to convince the requisite authorities they weren’t pulling their leg by attempting to set up shop in Batman. It was a strange decision to mount a legal challenge against one of the most well-known fictional figures on the planet when they’d been able to coexist side-by-side for half a century without trying to take it to the courts, but the bizarre situation eventually fizzled out.
In the end, nothing came of it at all, and Kalkan was imprisoned less than three months after The Dark Knight was released for promoting terrorism. Signing off with a suitably odd flourish, it reduced his lobbying for legal action and monetary compensation as one of the most unusual footnotes in the entire history of Batman’s – the character, to be clear – existence.
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