BEIJING, April 12 -- China's most popular website for booking cinema tickets has gone independent from its parent company as it is seeking to get into film production.

Maoyan.com was owned by Meituan and Dazhongdianping, two Internet firms that merged last year. Their detachment of Maoyan.com, announced on Monday night, will give the website more freedom to expand as China encourages diversification of web services under the "Internet Plus" initiative, Wang Xing, the parent firm's CEO said in an internal email.

Launched in 2012, Maoyan.com has grown to cover 5,000 cinemas and count over a million users. It also offers a forum for film fans to review and discuss the latest releases, among other services.

A record 44 billion yuan's (6.81 billion U.S.dollars) worth of movie tickets were sold by cinemas in China in 2015, up 48.7 percent year on year. Mobile apps have become the top choice for purchasing tickets, with more sold online than offline in 2015, according to a report released by Tencent, Meituan and Dazhongdianping in February.

The movie sector has become an emerging market drawing attention and investment from Chinese Internet companies. Last year, Tencent set up a company to focus on movie and TV series production while Alibaba included its online movie ticket purchase service and movie financing platform into Alibaba Pictures Group, its entertainment subsidiary to improve competitiveness.