Disney confirmed to The Washington Post on Wednesday that the series will instead be released as two films, the first to air on Fox in Turkey on Oct. 29 and the second to premiere in Turkish theaters on Dec. 22. Both films will return to Fox next summer. Disney purchased 21st Century Fox in 2019 in a landmark $71 billion acquisition.
The company did not comment on why its plans had changed or on the political controversy now swirling around the project, saying only that it was part of its “revised content distribution strategy.”
Yenicag, a Turkish daily newspaper, first reported Friday that the series had been removed from Disney Plus under pressure from Armenian American advocacy groups, which feared it would obscure Ataturk’s role in the Armenian genocide.
“It’s a shame that an American-based film and TV platform succumbed to the pressure of the Armenian lobby and canceled the ‘Ataturk’ series without airing it,” tweeted Omer Celik, deputy chairman of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP. “This attitude of the platform in question is disrespectful to the values of the Republic of Turkey and our nation.”
Ataturk took power after the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire during World War I, presiding over the formation of the Republic of Turkey in 1923 and serving as the country’s first president until his death in 1938.
He introduced political, economic and social reforms while promoting a secular Turkish national identity. He is so widely celebrated in Turkey today that insulting his name is a criminal offense.
“Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of our Republic of Turkey, is our most important social value,” Ebubekir Sahin, chair of Turkey’s Radio and Television Supreme Council, tweeted Tuesday. “The allegations of Armenian lobby intervention, which are reflected in the press, will be meticulously investigated.”
Historians estimate that 1.5 million Armenians, Assyrians and Greeks were killed in a campaign of forced marches and mass killings between 1915 and 1923, born out of Ottoman concerns that Christian communities would align with Russia during World War I. Armenians argue that the latter stages of the genocide were overseen by Ataturk once he took office.
Turkey has acknowledged that many Armenians were killed in fighting with Ottoman forces, but disputes the larger casualty counts and denies that the events constituted genocide.
In 2021, President Biden officially recognized the Armenian genocide, making him the first U.S. president to do so since Ronald Reagan.
“Ataturk completed the last stages of the crime; he denied it and then consolidated the fruits of that atrocity and set the stage for basically a century of Turkey obstructing justice for that crime,” said Aram Hamparian, executive director of the Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA), which lobbied for the cancellation of the series. “Turkey’s made a special effort to present Ataturk as a sort of a George Washington, when there’s just an awful lot more to the record than that.”
Disney Plus launched in Turkey in June 2022 as part of a global expansion that included new markets in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The launch included Disney Plus’s first Turkish-language original show, “Escape.”
