RunPee app helps full-bladdered moviegoers avoid missing important scenes

If you're heading to the movies this weekend, an app could help with the one thing you might not be thinking about until it's too late to ignore, reports CBS News correspondent Mark Strassmann.

For audiences torn between leaving a great movie and the pain of a needed bathroom break, the RunPee app comes to the rescue.

RunPee is the brainchild of Dan Florio, a former software engineer in Asheville, North Carolina. The 48-year-old was inspired to design it in 2008 after he saw "King Kong" in theaters -- a three-hour epic.

Ninety minutes in, it was that time.

"By the end of the movie I couldn't enjoy it. All I wanted was for King Kong -- for his heart to stop so the movie would be over and I could run to the restroom," Florio said. "Out of that pain came the RunPee app."

Florio watches movies differently than most. We want the high drama, the big laugh or the memorable one-liner, while he's looking for any three-to-four-minute stretch viewers can live without seeing.

"You don't want to come back into the theater and someone to be like, 'Hey Darth Vader is Luke's father,'" Florio said.

The app gives audiences several opportunities to go every movie and a quick summary of what they missed.

When it's time to think about going, the user's phone vibrates with an alert. The app now has 1 million downloads, and 450,000 active users with active bladders and occasional complaints.

For Disney's animated hit "Frozen," the app originally suggested a break during the song, "Let it Go."

"They're just singing a song. Well, it turned out to be that song that won all sorts of awards and stuff," Florio said.

He said he never imagined he could make a full-time living telling people at a theater when it's time to go.

"Every great app solves a great problem. Whether it's Google maps - you're lost and you need to find out how to get to someplace. Run Pee solves a problem," Florio said.

This time, it just happens to solve a first-world problem: when to go at the movies when you go to the movies.