Hollywood’s New Superhero Is the Guy Who Tells Moviegoers When to Pee

Edwin Hidalgo used every last bit of willpower to resist sprinting to the bathroom during “You Can See Everything,” the nearly three-hour documentary about Elizabeth Holmes.

“It felt like I was in a fever dream because I had to pee so bad that I started to feel quite literally delirious,” said Hidalgo, a 31-year-old product manager in New York City. “It somehow added to the whole psychological exhaustion of what I had essentially spent the last three hours watching.”

He’s not alone. In a recent Q&A on X, Holmes’s partner, Billy Evans, was asked what his first thought was after seeing the film. His response? “I really need to pee.”

We’re in the era of the ultralong movie. Some of this year’s biggest films, including “The Odyssey,” “Avengers: Doomsday” and the Holmes documentary, all clock in at nearly three hours. With no intermissions, viewers have to hold it or risk missing crucial moments.

They’re flocking to RunPee, an app that recommends the best times for bathroom breaks with synopses of what they’ve missed. The service has been around for nearly 20 years, but it’s been adding new users. Since the release of “You Can See Everything,” around 7,000 people signed up to get advice on when to wrench themselves away from the marathon duel of unblinking eye contact between Holmes and co-director Nathan Fielder.

Dan Gardner has clocked the uptick in movie runtimes. When he created RunPee in 2008, theatergoers could expect one extra-long film a year. Now it’s more like five a year. And audiences are antsy.

Inflation is hitting particularly hard for fans of action movies, which in the 2020s have clocked in at an average of 128 minutes, 25 minutes longer than a few decades prior, according to film-industry analyst Stephen Follows.

Gardner, a software developer living near Asheville, N.C., came up with the idea after soldiering through “King Kong,” Peter Jackson’s 187-minute epic. He had recently left his job at Microsoft and created it to show off his coding skills to potential clients.

This year, the app had around 231,000 active users in 214 countries from March through October. The release of “Barbenheimer” in 2023 was RunPee’s biggest weekend ever, with over 100,000 new installs that week.

Gardner writes the bulk of the bathroom guides, covering between 120 and 150 films a year, with help from his sister and a handful of contributors. It runs on a pay-as-you-wish model and currently takes in around $1,800 a month. For the past 15 years, he has lived primarily off the app’s revenue. (His wife, a software developer, earns more. They met when she reached out after using RunPee for “Avatar.”)

“I can hit a home run, you know, 100 at-bats in a row, but if I screw [the pee-times] up for ‘Endgame,’ I will never live it down,” Gardner said. He knows film buffs will scrutinize his work on highly anticipated releases, especially Marvel or Christopher Nolan films, which both inspire plenty of bathroom-break discourse. “Bat-Wielding Christopher Nolan Confronts Man Using Bathroom During ‘The Odyssey,’” joked an Onion headline this year.

Greg Meyer, a 38-year-old software engineer in New York City, found the app after one too many ill-timed breaks. He missed the sandworm scene in the first “Dune” film. “It was like, the worst time,” he said.

Gardner and his contributors weigh a few factors when choosing the best time for a bathroom break. The key is finding scenes that can easily be summarized. Straightforward exposition is often good, as are montages. Mysteries are the hardest, because seemingly unimportant details end up being crucial. If it’s an action movie, they’ll try to avoid a major action sequence. They usually see the film just once to write the guide.

The goal is to find a pee time approximately every 30 minutes. Not all of these are ranked equally—a green thumbs-up means an optimal window to run out, while a red thumbs-down means emergencies only. The app has a built-in stopwatch that users start when a film begins, and they get a notification ahead of each pee time.

Troy Sageser, the contributor who wrote the app’s guide for “You Can See Everything,” said the movie presented distinct challenges. The film buff, who worked for AMC theaters in Oklahoma for over 20 years, began writing for the app this year. He’s paid $50 a film.

Of the four breaks he recommended, three were marked emergencies only. He liked just one—a montage of Holmes and Evans calling investors about an hour into the film. Sageser originally selected a scene in which Fielder and Holmes watched an Abbott and Costello routine. But Gardner removed it after users complained it wasn’t a good time to go.

Sageser thinks viewers would be wise to go easy on the soda for this one.

“Don’t go for the whole time if you can avoid it.”