A bizarre new app tells keen moviegoers the best time for them to dip out of the screening room to use the restroom mid-movie.
Designed for avid cinema lovers, RunPee tells its users when to make a quick restroom break during a film that allows them to keep tabs on the storyline.
Dan Gardner, the creator of the app, said his app allows viewers to 'find the best time to run to the bathroom' during screenings.
Gardner came up with the concept in 2005 after watching 'King Kong,' which screened for about three and a half hours.
Three years later, he officially launched the app – prompting it to start getting traction a year later.
According to the app store description, users can look up their movie in RunPee before it starts to view a list of staff-selected 'Peetimes.'
The app selects three to four-minute scenes for viewers to choose from.
Each entry provides precise timing cues, break durations, and optional scene summaries so moviegoers never have to ask what happened while they were away.
A new app was created to tell moviegoers when to pause the film to use the restroom
Dan Gardner, the creator of the app, said his app allows viewers to 'find the best time to run to the bathroom' during screenings
According to the app store description, users can look up their movie in RunPee before it starts to view a list of staff-selected 'Peetimes'
'Never in my wildest dreams did I think RunPee would be anything more than a niche app with a few hundred users at best,' Gardner wrote on his website.
'Currently, there are over 250,000 people who use the app at least once a month.'
Edwin Hidalgo, a 31-year-old product manager from New York, struggled to hold in his urge to use the restroom during the three-hour Elizabeth Holmes documentary, according to The Wall Street Journal.
He described the experience as a 'fever dream,' noting that holding it in made him feel delirious and worsened the film's intense mental fatigue.
'It felt like I was in a fever dream because I had to pee so bad that I started to feel quite literally delirious,' Hidalgo told the outlet.
'It somehow added to the whole psychological exhaustion of what I had essentially spent the last three hours watching.'
Even Elizabeth Holmes's partner, Billy Evans, joked on X that his 'first thought' from seeing the film was needing a bathroom break.
With blockbuster runtimes regularly reaching three hours, viewers are downloading RunPee for timed break alerts and missed-scene summaries.
The app gained roughly 7,000 new users around the same time as the premiere of 'You Can See Everything.'
Gardner noted that while three-hour films were rare back in 2008, they have now become the new normal in the movie industry in today's age.
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