It’s Groundhog Day All Over Again, and Again

There aren’t many movies that are so successful they spawn an entire genre, but that’s what happened with the classic 1993 Bill Murray comedy Groundhog Day, in which the dyspeptic and misanthropic weatherman Phil Connors is appalled to find himself reliving the same February 2 over and over again in Punxsutawney, Pa. In an ingenious move, the Harold Ramis-Danny Rubin screenplay never wastes any precious time explaining why this is happening. Instead, it uses its screen time to explore every conceivable comic, emotional, and philosophical ramification of Phil’s existential crisis, swerving from broad comedy to despair to romcom with unerring confidence.

Groundhog Day wasn’t the first story built around the idea of a repeating day, or even a repeating holiday — William Dean Howells’ “Christmas Every Day” deployed a version of the notion in 1892. But it seems like the moment the movie hit screens it altered writers’ brain chemistry and suddenly the time loop became as standard a narrative gambit as the road trip, the fish-out-of-water, and the meet cute. If you’re not too busy with all your other Groundhog Day activities, consider commemorating the day with some other iterations of the trope like the ones below.

There aren’t many movies that are so successful they spawn an entire genre, but that’s what happened with the classic 1993 Bill Murray comedy Groundhog Day, in which the dyspeptic and misanthropic weatherman Phil Connors is appalled to find himself reliving the same February 2 over and over again in Punxsutawney, Pa. In an ingenious move, the Harold Ramis-Danny Rubin screenplay never wastes any precious time explaining why this is happening. Instead, it uses its screen time to explore every conceivable comic, emotional, and philosophical ramification of Phil’s existential crisis, swerving from broad comedy to despair to romcom with unerring confidence.

There aren’t many movies that are so successful they spawn an entire genre, but that’s what happened with the classic 1993 Bill Murray comedy Groundhog Day, in which the dyspeptic and misanthropic weatherman Phil Connors is appalled to find himself reliving the same February 2 over and over again in Punxsutawney, Pa. In an ingenious move, the Harold Ramis-Danny Rubin screenplay never wastes any precious time explaining why this is happening. Instead, it uses its screen time to explore every conceivable comic, emotional, and philosophical ramification of Phil’s existential crisis, swerving from broad comedy to despair to romcom with unerring confidence.