According to Li, the alliance between Zhouheiya and Transformers 4 includes cinema advertisements and viral videos, and the decoration of some Zhouheiya stores with a Transformer theme.

"Zhouheiya has 400 stores in communities, airports, train stations and other major locations across China, which will work as easy promotion platforms for the film," she says.

"This is one of the reasons why Paramount Pictures, the production company of the Transformer movies, was keen on firming up the alliance."

The studio has also incorporated some Chinese elements in Transformers 4, with an eye on the growing audience in China. Some of the fight scenes between the Autobots and the Decepticons (main characters in the movie) were filmed in Wulong, Chongqing. Popular Chinese actress Li Bingbing plays a prominent role in the movie with Mark Wahlberg and four rising Chinese actors selected from a national TV reality show.

China Movie Channel, a TV channel affiliated to the State-run China Film Group, has helped Paramount with production-related work and will also distribute the film in China. However, the film is still not an official co-production.

Protecting the market

China prudently protects its film market. Every year, only 34 foreign films can be imported on revenue-sharing basis for theatrical release. Foreign studios get no more than 25 percent of the box office receipts.

However, a co-produced film acknowledged by the top regulator, the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and TV, is treated as a domestic film and thus exempt from the quota system.

Foreign studios, as a result, can share the revenue as per their agreements with Chinese partners.

Co-productions used to be perceived as an effective way to tap the Chinese market, where box-office receipts rose to 20 billion yuan ($3.2 billion) in 2013. This year, the revenue has so far reached 10 billion yuan, a 30 percent increase over the same period last year.

But it is not easy to be officially licensed as a co-production.

Since late 2010, SAPPRFT has tightened its control on the licensing of co-productions.

"A completely US story, some Chinese money, a few Chinese faces and some Chinese elements - these kind of films are not real co-productions," Zhang Pimin, the former deputy chief of the SAPPRFT, said in 2012.

Zhang had reiterated that in an officially acknowledged co-production, at least one-third of the lead cast should be Chinese, the story should have Chinese elements and there should be Chinese investors.

According to Chinese film producer Qiu Yan, in the absence of a proper rating system in China, filmmakers have to make sure that an audience aged from 4 to 80 can see the content they produce.

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