Li Weinan spends two months preparing a perfect marriage proposal for his wife Zhang Naishu. Photos provided to Shanghai Star

They were already married but Li Weinan still felt he needed to give his wife a marriage proposal to remember. Zhou Wenting reports on a cinematic finish.

Zhang Naishu was in a cinema watching a Japanese animated film with her husband, when suddenly the movie stopped and her pictures appeared on the big screen.

She was frozen in her seat. Did her husband bribe the projectionist? When did he prepare the photos and make them into a video clip? How would the rest of the audience feel? He said he needed to go to the restroom but did he actually go to create this surprise?

Questions kept running through Zhang's mind until the lights in the theater were switched on and her husband Li Weinan walked on stage in a well-ironed suit.

The surprise was the "proposal" that Li had spent two months preparing. Although they had registered for marriage a year before, Li still felt that he owed his wife a decent, romantic proposal.

He searched numerous proposal ideas online. He rejected any suggestions that took place in public, as he believed he would be disturbed by on-lookers and would be nervous in the middle of a crowd.

"So I came up with the idea of booking a whole cinema so that it would take place in a more private environment with all our intimate buddies who knew our love story," says Li, a 28-year-old software engineer, who spent 2,000 yuan ($322) hiring the venue.

One weekend in May, Li invited a couple of friends to their home for a games night and the friends stayed overnight. The next morning, someone suggested going to watch a film, so they checked the schedule of a nearby cinema and set off.

Everyone wanted to watch the animation Smart Monk Ikkyu San, so Zhang agreed to see the film too. The theater was almost empty when they entered but Zhang didn't sense anything unusual.