Stan Lee, no longer officially connected to the company save for the title of "Chairman Emeritus", remains a visible face in the industry. In 2002, he sued successfully for a share of income related to movies and merchandising of Marvel characters, based on a contract between Lee and Marvel from the late 1990s; according to court documents, Marvel had used "Hollywood accounting" to claim that those projects' "earnings" were not profits. Marvel Comics' parent company Marvel Entertainment continues to be traded on the New York Stock Exchange as MVL. Some of its characters have been turned into successful film franchises, the highest-grossing being the X-Men film series, starting in 2000, and the Spider-Man series, beginning in 2002