Summer brings many seasonal competitions, from paddling regattas and pennant races to the chase for the money of the movie-going public. This summer, that particular contest carries an enhanced Asian flavor.

Variety reported in recent days that “Transformers: Age of Extinction” has become the first film of 2014 to surpass $1 billion at the global box office. About a third of that figure, the trade magazine says, has come from China.

This is the fourth installment of the Transformers franchise. It was partially shot in Hong Kong and in mainland China, surely with an eye toward Chinese audiences — especially certain government employees. Only 34 foreign made films are allowed to be shown in China each year, so every piece of localized shooting helps a movie make it into the realm of official acceptance.

A statue of Optimus Prime, the main character from the Transformer films. Prime was one of an array of Transformer statues recently on display in Shenzhen, China, where the latest film has been a huge hit.

Flickr.com: dcmaster

Sometimes that means superfluous scenes are tacked onto a screenplay. Last year’s “Iron Man 3,” included a four-minute section that was added to the version that played in China. It just happened to include additional Chinese actors and locations, and none of the action was essential to the development of the plot.

The rewards for success in the Chinese film market are immense and growing. Last year, China added more than 5,000 movie screens, according to the nation’s State General Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television. The same division of the Chinese government says the total number of screens around the country now tops 18,000, and it continues to rise. Ticket sales were up by nearly a third last year to more than 600 million tickets.

No wonder Hollywood is willing to alter films to improve box office prospects in China. And tweaking a foreign movie to please a home crowd is not exactly a new concept.

The Godzilla Precedent

In 1956, Jewell Enterprises in the United States produced “Godzilla, King of the Monsters!” which re-edited the original Japanese version of “Godzilla” and pasted in a Raymond Burr-as-reporter character complete with an English-language narrative. Despite sour reviews, the finished film garnered a sweet box office take: eventually pulling in more than $2 million at U.S. theaters, plus export revenue from Europe and Latin America. And that was all before the movie was placed in seemingly permanent Sunday afternoon rotation on television stations across America for decades to come.

The idea of re-editing an Asian film and dubbing it into English to squeeze some domestic American mileage out of it was a revolutionary one 60 years ago. But box office and commercial considerations have moved on considerably since then.

A stand out in the globalized film industry this summer is the extent of international product placement that’s become a routine part of the background in so many movies. In the latest installment of Transformers, you’ll see a particular kind of a Chinese milk drink, as well as a certain Chinese bank named on an ATM card. Other inanimate objects, from computers to edible duck necks, pop up in story lines for little apparent reason, silently but relentlessly, branding themselves for potential consumers.

There’s another Asian newcomer to this summer’s U.S. box office. “Snowpiercer” is a science fiction action flick set aboard a train that circles the earth with a perpetual-motion motor, which became necessary after an experiment to fight global warming went terribly wrong.

Directed by Bong Joon-ho, Snowpiercer was released last year in South Korea, where it has cracked the top 10 list of highest-grossing films in the country’s history. Four of the seven producers listed are Korean. So are the editors, the cinematographer, and a number of cast members.

A certain degree of globalism has been part of the American movie industry for decades, from the “spaghetti westerns” of the 1960s, made by Italian directors and producers, to the purchase of Columbia Pictures 25 years ago by Japan-based Sony, and through the international financing that has today become another industry norm.

But Hollywood has usually exported the finished product. The idea of increased future collaboration with Asian creative partners earlier in the process of plotting and story telling is an intriguing one.

There is one other bit of product placement that goes on in movies — and that has to do with location. In the northern part of Vietnam, the rock formations dotting Halong Bay were featured in the 1992 French film, “Indochine.” The next year, a local government official told me that those scenes were enough to cause tourism in the area to explode.

The most popular domestically produced movie in China remains “Lost in Thailand”—a zany on-the-road comedy.

The film came out in 2012, and the Hollywood Reporter quoted the economic research arm of Kasikorn Bank as saying the movie as the primary factor in a spike of Chinese tourism to Thailand.

According to the country’s Tourism Authority, the number of Chinese tourists visiting Thailand soared by 93 percent in the first quarter of 2013 compared to a year earlier.

So it might make more sense to forget the Mandarin speakers, the signs in Chinese, the banquet facilities and all the other additions that consultants advise Hawaii to focus on when it comes to developing Chinese tourism.

Apparently all we need is a blockbuster film with Chinese characters and a plot line that comes through the islands, preferably with the climactic scenes shot in Honolulu.