World Crisis Looms as City of Batman Revolts Against Christopher Nolan

No one in Hollywood likely ever expected to see the words “Batman” and “Turkey” in the same sentence, but a developing story out of the Balkans reaffirms our faith in the impossible: The mayor of an actual Turkish city called Batman announced over the weekend he plans to sue director Christopher Nolan for naming infringement.

Frustrated over the superhero’s incursion into his centuries-old city’s cultural turf, mayor Hüseyin Kalkan’s proposed lawsuit would nevertheless omit Batman creator Bob Kane, publisher DC Comics and film franchisee Warner Bros. as Nolan’s co-defendants. Instead, it would hold the filmmaker himself singly responsible for the region’s growing international reputation as a brooding, froggy-voiced world capital of mayhem — none of it in glorious IMAX:

“The royalty of the name ‘Batman’ belongs to us … There is only one Batman in the world. The American producers used the name of our city without informing us,” Kalkan told to the Doğan news agency.

Mayor Kalkan, speaking to the Hürriyet Daily News and the Economic Review, said last year foreign media picked up on Batman and the city’s increasing suicide rates among women. He said a columnist asked why Batman’s mayor did not sue the movie Batman for royalties while struggling with economic problems. “We found this criticism right and started to look for legal possibilities of a case like that,” he said.

Naturally, we sympathise with the mayor’s social crisis, not to mention the bind in which Batman natives have found themselves outside the country; one Turk in Germany told reporters that Warner Bros. issued a cease-and-desist from naming his two restaurants after his hometown. To be fair, however, Batman Grill, The Dark Bite™ and a spectrum of other eatery variations are in fact the fiercely protected province of Six Flags, and a lawyer in Istanbul noted that the Batman Municipality has already missed the periodduring which it could file an objection to Batman’s trademark as a superhero.

Still, we think this is far from over, with the whole scenario prompting noted Oscar diplomacy expert Dave Karger to reconsider his controversial theory on “How Obama Helps Batman.” This is NATO’s jurisdiction all the way.

• Real life Batman faces super test [Hürriyet Daily News via Hollywood Newsroom]