OK, you've slurped that tub of soda, and you downed a couple of iced lattes before you took your seat. So you're sitting there watching Optimus Prime battle some Decepticons in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, and you realize you probably need to hit the restroom.

If you get up now, are you going to miss a pivotal moment?

What about now? Or now?

Worry no more. Dan Florio, creator of the Web site RunPee.com, has sat through Transformers 2 - and The Proposal, The Taking of Pelham 123, My Sister's Keeper, and a couple of hundred other movies - jotting down times and typing notes on his iPhone, all so that you can slip out of the theater and slip back in, secure in the knowledge that Megan Fox and Wheelie the Decepticon didn't create an alien love 'bot in your absence.

Go to RunPee.com and Florio will cue you to the best times to get up and go, how long you've got (usually three to four minutes), and provide a succinct summary of what you've missed. (The synopsis is scrambled, so there's no chance of a spoiler - unscramble it at your leisure.)

The site's mission: "to help you enjoy your moviegoing experience and relieve your bladder at the same time."

Its brilliant logic: "Every movie has a few scenes in there somewhere that aren't crucial to the plot. Every movie has a few minutes you can miss and not be lost when you sit back down. No more guessing when to run and pee!"

Its humanitarianism: "Slip out to the concession stand. Run out and make a phone call. Or use this time to sit back and make out with your date. We only tell you when there are scenes that you can miss and still catch on to the plot. How you use this time is up to you!"

Florio, a 42-year-old Web developer ("I actually built RunPee as a learning tool"), had his lightbulb moment while watching Peter Jackson's very long King Kong remake in 2005. He registered the domain name in a matter of days, but it took him a couple of years to build the site (http://runpee.com), integrate the databases, and formulate the nifty algorithms and time bars that make it the user-friendly, vesica-friendly work of genius that it is.

The film that launched the site: Wall-E. (About 30 minutes in, right after Wall-E and Eve talk for the first time - you will have about two minutes.)

Things were slow at first - the site would go days without a hit - but then Florio's mother suggested he contact Leo Laporte, The Tech Guy radio-show host. Florio was interviewed, and the Web traffic started to bump, users began to post comments, Florio launched a companion RunPee blog. T-shirts and coffee mugs followed. It was a veritable e-snowball.

And Wednesday, Apple introduced the RunPee application for its iPhone. Download it from iTunes, and check your relief times in the theater. There's even a built-in timer that lets you know how long you've got until the next designated break. (Florio features two or three recommended break times for some films.)

If the iPhone app takes off, it'll be the first real money Florio has seen from his site. RunPee.com wasn't originally designed to support ads, although a major rebuild, slated to debut over the Thanksgiving holiday movie season, will happily accommodate studios and other advertisers.

And Florio has been contacted by folks in India and Malaysia, about launching RunPee overseas.

"They thought it would be handy," he says, on his phone, fresh from seeing Johnny Depp in Public Enemies. "So I would imagine that in the future, we'll team up. I'll make an international version, say, for India, and I'll find a couple of professional movie reviewers and somehow share ad revenue with them, or I'll pay them outright, to do the pee times for the movies in that area."

A self-taught techie who studied philosophy and history at Northern Arizona University, Florio - just moved to Orlando from the Los Angeles area - is a self-confessed movie buff who takes his RunPee job seriously.

"I can't take a pee break, this is very true," he acknowledges. "But I do a really good job, like, right before the movie begins, I run to the bathroom - and I don't drink a big soda beforehand.

"But I just got out of Public Enemies, and I've never seen a movie where so many people got up during the movie to go to the restroom," he says, sounding truly concerned. "It's two hours and 23 minutes long, and here in Florida, the demographic is a little bit older. There are more folks with bladder issues."

Recommended RunPee time for Michael Mann's Depression-era gangster pic: About one hour, 25 minutes into the movie. Here's the entry Florio posted on the site: "When . . . Melvin Purvis - Christian Bale - and a bunch of FBI agents are outside a cabin in the woods making plans to go in and capture John Dillinger. When some of the gang leaves in a car, Melvin Purvis shouts 'Stop the car!' and then a shootout begins."

You will have about five minutes.

"That's a really long gunfight . . . the one in the woods," Florio says, before he'd actually posted the above recommendation. "You can't even really see who's who anyway. . . . Plenty of time. You can even go do number two."

Short subjects. Universal Pictures outspent the competition this week and landed the rights to make, um, Asteroids. Yes, a movie based on an old Atari video game in which a spaceship shoots incoming asteroids out of the way, or gets obliterated in the process. Writer, anyone? . . . It doesn't open in theaters until late August, and already Quentin Tarantino is talking about a prequel to his Nazi-hunt war pic, Inglourious Basterds. Harvey Weinstein confirms in GQ that Tarantino and his star, Brad Pitt, are thinking Inglourious II, and Weinstein says he'll be ready to bankroll the putative production. . . . Singer Christina Aguilera will make her screen debut in Burlesque, starring as a small-town girl with a big-time voice, mentored by a club proprietor played by Cher. Shooting starts in the fall.

Contact movie critic Steven Rea at 215-854-5629 or srea@phillynews.com. Read his blog, "On Movies Online,"

at http://go.philly.com/onmovies.