Which Movies Have the Hardest Peetimes to Find?

One of the questions I get asked most is: "Which movie was the hardest to find Peetimes for?" When you see the number one below, you'll probably nod along: "Yeah, that tracks." (Want to guess now? One hint — RunPee launched in 2008, so the answer has to be a film from after that.)

Below are a few movies that took an unusual amount of work, and what made each one hard. Consider it a look behind the scenes.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

I expected this one to be difficult, but — my god. There was almost nowhere to start.

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The first step in finding a Peetime is to note the Cue and the time it appears, then start writing up what happens in that stretch. Sometimes the film suddenly pulls something and I think: "No, that's a signature scene, nobody wants to miss it." So that Peetime gets scrapped and I look again. Some scenes are obviously not Peetime material; others look right and aren't. Heavily emotional scenes, for instance, you have to see for yourself — I can't relay that impact to you in a Synopsis. Character introductions almost never become Peetimes, and character deaths rarely do either.

By the end of Across the Spider-Verse, everything I had left was a Peetime I'd already rejected. One of them was passable, honestly; the rest were dire. I didn't want to include them, but the point of RunPee is to give you a choice — and a bad choice beats no choice. So we try to have a Peetime every 20 to 45 minutes, good ones and bad ones alike. At least we can warn you which ones are bad and Recommend the relatively better ones, and hope your bladder has some room left.

1917

Every scene in this film carries weight, but I still pulled out 3 — ones you can picture from the Synopsis without giving away too much of the story.

Beyond the great performances and the gripping story, the most remarkable thing about this movie is that it's one continuous take. At least it looks that way. The action and the tension never let up, so good Peetimes have nowhere to appear. There's a decent one near the end: the soldier drifting down the stream. Other than that, you're rolling the dice.

Killers of the Flower Moon

I made five Peetimes, and for a film on this epic scale that still isn't enough.

This one is hard in a different way: it's too long. Three and a half hours of finding Peetimes back to back wears you down, even when the film itself isn't difficult. Making Peetimes is work, and it's never easy — you have to follow the story and take notes at the same time, and three hours-plus in one sitting is genuinely too much.

Top Gun: Maverick

No question, this is one of the hardest movies I've ever done. There isn't a single Peetime in it that I'd want to Recommend. But that's the job, so you do what you can.

This is another film that keeps you wound tight the whole way through; every scene is doing a job. The only one I'm happy with is the last Peetime: Maverick suits up, climbs into the jet, ready for the raid on the enemy base. You could argue "nothing much happens" — it's really just him saying a fond goodbye to his crew chief, and then the jet takes off. But the tension is thick enough to press down on you. I'd hate to miss that stretch, but if my bladder couldn't hold, I'd rather deal with it there so I can enjoy the climax at the end in peace, uninterrupted.

Knives Out

Mysteries are the hardest genre of all for Peetimes. I try to get every key piece of information into each Synopsis, and the result is that the Synopses run longer than usual.

Any film that's hard to follow is hard to make Peetimes for. What makes mysteries worse than other genres is that you think you've found a perfect Peetime, and thirty minutes later you realise that some unremarkable detail in that stretch was the key to the whole puzzle. Knives Out is one of the few films I went back and rewatched specifically to confirm I hadn't got the Peetimes wrong.

Barbenheimer

Two movies back to back, five hours of making Peetimes without a break.

("芭本海默" is a phonetic transliteration of Barbenheimer. In 2023 Barbie and Oppenheimer opened in the US on the same day, audiences watched both in one day, and that's where the portmanteau came from; in mainland China the two films opened five weeks apart, and the craze never happened here.)

Every so often I have to do Peetimes for two films in one day, and I'm grateful whenever the showtimes line up. Barbenheimer worked out exactly right: straight from the first showing of Oppenheimer to Barbie, with just enough time in between for me to use the bathroom myself. But it also meant five straight hours of work. Barbie was difficult, though not crazy. Oppenheimer was much harder. As I wrote in the RunPee app: finding a decent Peetime was a real slog — most of the film is built from a run of short shots, few of them longer than a minute.

Avengers: Endgame

No surprise, this one was hard. The last Peetime falls more than an hour before the end of the film — and trust me, there is nothing after it you can afford to miss.

I was angry the entire time I worked on this movie. In three hours of film there is exactly one Peetime that barely passes. Remember the scene where they come back from the time travel? Everyone returns except Black Widow. I had to make that a Peetime, and I felt bad about it the whole time I was writing it. My internal note on that Peetime was: this stretch isn't hard to summarise, but it carries a lot of information, a lot of scenes, a lot of interaction between characters.

It isn't hard to summarise — but it's everyone mourning Black Widow. Still, there were only two roads in front of me: use it, or have no Peetime at all across a full two hours of runtime. So I steeled myself and sacrificed the mourning scene for Black Widow.

Inception

I watched this one three times in a row before I understood the film well enough to make decent Peetimes.

This is the benchmark for difficulty. It runs 2 hours 28 minutes, which isn't short. It has a mystery element, and mysteries, as I said above, are the hardest genre. It has visual set pieces people still bring up today. And it has long expository scenes laying out how everything works — or trying to. Exposition often makes a decent Peetime: the film spends a few minutes on the fine details of some MacGuffin, and what it all comes down to is "we have to defuse the bomb before everybody dies."

But the exposition in Inception is your only hope of half-following the movie, and it's far, far more complex than the usual. On opening night, my mother was the one who made the Peetimes for this film. She made them, but told me she had no idea what was going on and no idea whether the Peetimes were any good. I went the next night and watched it myself, and it all made sense. The day after that I went again, two showings back to back, and only then did I feel I understood it well enough to Recommend the best Peetimes. Not that they're good — this movie has no good Peetimes, only the least bad options.

Honourable Mentions

RunPee only came along in 2008. Among the films released before that, I can think of a few where the Peetimes would be extremely hard.

The Shawshank Redemption A few years after RunPee launched, my mother and I rewatched this movie, and I remember being glad we didn't have to make Peetimes for it. Every scene is poetry; missing any of it would be a crime.

Jaws Another classic. There are slower stretches in it, but they build the suspense so skilfully that missing any of them would be a shame.

Star Wars We actually did make Peetimes for this one, purely for fun. The only halfway acceptable Peetime I could find is the stretch where they escape the Death Star and have to shoot down the TIE fighters. That's a classic scene too, of course — but in this movie, which scene isn't?

What do you think? What other older films would be especially hard to find Peetimes for?