Chinese encyclopedias credit us with the word 尿点. We can't prove it.
尿点 is standard vocabulary now. Its most common form is the negation — 全程无尿点, start to finish not one moment worth leaving for — and it's high praise that any Chinese moviegoer understands without explanation.
Baidu Baike's entries for 尿点 and 无尿点 carry an origin story for it, and that story is reproduced across most of the Chinese reference web. It goes like this:
An American movie website went viral in 2009 and was called 史上最实用电影网站 — the most useful movie website ever. Chinese film fans carried it in through Douban and Mtime. In December 2010, reviewers of 《让子弹飞》 described its pacing as 只有笑点、没有尿点 — only laughs, no pee-points — and 全程无尿点 spread from there.
That website is RunPee. Dan Gardner built it in 2008 and still runs it.
The part we're not going to overstate
The account is uncited, and we cannot verify it.
It is one encyclopedia entry copied hundreds of times, and repetition is not corroboration. There's a competing claim that puts the first use in 2011. As far as we can find, nobody has ever gone back to the 2009–2010 Douban and Mtime threads to check.
So the sentence we can stand behind is "Chinese reference works credit RunPee" — not "RunPee gave Chinese the word." We would rather be quoted accurately than impressively, and if the attribution turns out not to hold up, that's a real answer and we'd publish it.
If you can find those original threads, we would genuinely like to know what's in them. Either way.
It's a good story regardless of how it lands, and the reason is the gap itself: a phrase used by hundreds of millions of people has an origin that every Chinese encyclopedia asserts and nobody has ever tested.
What the app actually does, briefly
Somebody sits through the entire film with a stopwatch, marks the windows you can leave for three or four minutes without losing the plot, and writes down two things — a cue you can recognise in the dark, and a summary of what you missed.
Not an algorithm. An AI that hasn't sat in the seat doesn't know that the quiet scene it flagged is the one the ending depends on. Scenes disqualify themselves for reasons that don't show up in a runtime: a line you'll need later, a face you have to have seen, a visual joke that pays off an hour on.
The method is its own page, and so is the rule the whole thing runs on.
Using RunPee in China — everything that's wrong with it
We'd rather you heard this from us than found it out.
- Mainland Android can't reach Google Play. There's a browser version at runpee.net/app that needs nothing installed. It works — but the film titles still render in English, and about twenty-three interface strings haven't been translated yet.
- This site is slow from inside China. We have no ICP filing, so it's served cross-border with no China CDN. Readable, not fast. We're not going to pretend otherwise.
- We don't have a single Chinese Peep yet. Every Peetime you can read today was found by someone watching an international release. Films released only in China have nobody on them. This is the thing we most want to fix.
- We're not a Chinese company and have no Chinese entity. No Weibo, no WeChat account, no Xiaohongshu. Email is the way to reach us.
Who makes this
One person, since 2008. Around 250,000 people use it.
It's free — no paywall, no subscription, no premium tier, no ad network, and none of those are planned. It runs on donations and on a single sponsor card at the top of the Peetimes screen, with one Executive Producer slot per film. That ceiling is deliberate: the person looking at that card is sitting in a dark cinema and needs an answer, and anything standing between them and it gets resented rather than tapped.
The store listings in more than forty languages, this site, the marketing — that's one person and a set of AI agents. It works better than it has any right to, and it's still why everything is slow.
If you're in China, you see a lot of films, and the idea of being the person with the stopwatch appeals to you — we'd like to hear from you. We're not recruiting yet and we can't promise anything today. But when it opens, we'd rather already know who you are.
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