The app that tells you the best time to run and pee during a movie without missing the best scenes
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What Is a Peetime?

In a three-hour movie, sooner or later you're going to need the bathroom. The question was never whether to go. It's when to go without missing anything that matters.

A Peetime is that moment. RunPee finds the few minutes in a movie that are best for stepping out, and tells you when they start, how long they run, and what happened on screen while you were gone.

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What's in a Peetime

Open any movie in the app and every Peetime gives you four things:

  • Start time. Accurate to within about 5 seconds, counted from the start of the movie.
  • Cue. A line of dialogue or a clear image. See it or hear it, and that's your signal to go. We work extra hard to make sure the Cue doesn't spoil anything. (You're welcome.)
  • Length. Usually 2½ to 5 minutes. Enough time to take care of business and get right back, if you don't dawdle. That's the "Run" in RunPee.
  • Synopsis. Tap the Peetime and you get a full account of what happened while you were out. Detailed enough to put you back in the story, short enough to read in the hallway or the stall.

Each Peetime also carries a short note about the kind of scene you'll miss: a stretch of exposition, a repetitive action sequence, a little romance. In an action movie, you can pick which sort of scene you'd rather skip.

The app has a timer too. It buzzes about 30 seconds before each Peetime, so you don't have to keep checking your phone, and it works in Airplane Mode. How to use RunPee walks through it.

The Types of Peetimes

Not every Peetime is equally good. Our goal in every movie is to find one roughly every 30 minutes through the middle of the film, and some of those spots are better than others. We mark the difference so you don't have to guess.

Recommended

The thumbs-up. It's plenty long and doesn't have any crucial scenes in it. If you see the Recommended marker, go without a second thought.

Emergency

Sometimes there's a long gap between two good Peetimes, with nothing genuinely safe in the middle. Rather than leave you with nothing, we include the minutes that cost you the least. An Emergency Peetime means: we don't recommend it, but if you're in a tight spot and really can't wait, this will do.

Ordinary Peetimes

Most Peetimes fall somewhere in between and aren't labeled either way. They're regular Peetimes: perfectly usable, just not good enough to single out.

Alert

This one has nothing to do with the bathroom. On rare occasions we mark a scene as an Alert so people who don't want to see it can step out. Alerts cover three things: animal cruelty, torture and sexual violence.

Alerts are relative to the movie. Torture in a gangster movie comes with the genre, so we wouldn't flag it. Animal cruelty in that same gangster movie, we would.

Two honest caveats. Alerts are subjective, and we do our best without being perfect. And they aren't a full list of content warnings; they can't cover everything someone might be sensitive to. If a particular kind of scene is hard for you, the safest bet is to ask someone who's already seen the movie. Alerts are an extra service fans asked for. Our laser focus is still on finding the best Peetimes. More on Alert Peetimes.

A Peetime Isn't Just "a Boring Bit"

This is the most common misunderstanding. The test for a Peetime isn't "this part isn't very good." It's this:

Can this stretch be retold briefly and accurately, at the smallest cost to the plot and the emotional punch?

That's a big difference. An action movie has almost no boring stretches, and we still find Peetimes in it. A quiet art film can be slow from start to finish and have none, because the quiet is the point.

The question we actually ask is: if you leave for three minutes, can a short Synopsis put you back in the story when you sit down? If it can, it's a Peetime. If it can't, it doesn't count, however uneventful it looks.

Peetimes Are Found, Not Assigned

We don't carve out a random stretch just so a movie has one. Where a Peetime falls depends on how the movie was paced and edited, not on where we'd like it to be.

So some movies have four or five Peetimes, some have one, and a few have none. That isn't us being lazy. That's the shape the movie came in. If a movie has no safe spot, we say so.

Movies With Good Peetimes Are Often Good Movies

You'd think lots of Peetimes means a movie drags. In our experience, since 2008 and more than 2,300 movies, it's often the opposite.

  • Movies with steady pacing and clean editing are easier to find Peetimes in. Good structure breathes: setup, transition, a moment to rest. Those stretches are there because the director knows the audience needs them.
  • The hard ones keep cutting between several groups of characters in several places. Every cut moves a different thread forward. Leave for three minutes and you may come back lost. Movies like that often don't yield a single safe Peetime, not because they're too gripping, but because they're hard to follow in the first place.

So when we say a movie has good Peetimes, we're not saying it's slow. We're saying it tells its story clearly enough that three minutes out of the middle won't throw you off.

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