":I won't reiterate what the professor has stated above, but there is a ""Middle-Earth"" franchise, or at the very least there is a ""Lord of the Rings"" franchise"" to which all Lord of the Rings adaptations belong. You cannot just go out and make a Lord of the Rings film without the required licensing, since all LOTR films are made from the same intellectual property. The Peter Jackson series is not a franchise, it is one instance of an independently produced series in a franchise that includes multiple adaptations across multiple media. Batman is similar: Batman is a franchise that includes comics, multiple independent adaptations and merchandise. We could just have a chart of each independent series, but that would mean separating the Batman films, separating the Spider-Man films etc, but the chart does this anyway, because you can just expand the entries. The article retains a neutral point of view on what data we present, since readers may be just as interested in the collective value of the whole Batman franchise as opposed to just one series in it; on the other hand, they must just be interested in the Nolan series. Either way it doesn't matter because both sets of data are given. Likewise with the Middle Earth films, the reader has access to how much the franchise has earned as a whole, how much the Jackson series has earned as a whole, and how much just the LOTR trilogy within the Jackson series has earned as a whole. It covers all possible ways a reader might want to interpret the information. As for the information being out of date, there is usually a short lag between Sunday-Monday as the data is released and then update in the chart.   

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