Groundhog Day

Writer Danny Rubin had the idea in 1990, sitting in a theater reading Anne Rice's The Vampire Lestat and wondering what a person would do with unlimited time. He folded it into an older notion of a man who wakes to the same day repeating, opened a calendar to find the next holiday, landed on February 2, and named his weatherman after Punxsutawney Phil. He wrote it as a calling-card spec script, and in 1991 it reached Harold Ramis, who admitted he did not laugh reading it but loved the spirituality underneath and worked with Rubin to add the comedy.

Filming ran from March to June 1992, almost entirely in Woodstock, Illinois, standing in for Punxsutawney. It was bitterly cold, the groundhog bit Murray twice on the same knuckle, and Murray, in the middle of a divorce, fought Ramis over whether the film should be philosophical or funny. Ramis later described him as "irrationally mean and unavailable." The two, who had made Caddyshack and Ghostbusters together, barely spoke again for nearly two decades, reconciling only in the final months of Ramis's life in 2014.

Columbia released it on February 12, 1993. It opened at number one and finished with about $70.9 million in North America and roughly $105 million worldwide, a solid hit rather than a phenomenon, and won the BAFTA for best original screenplay. The phenomenon came later. Roger Ebert raised his review from three stars to four in 2005, the Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry in 2006, and Empire named it the greatest comedy ever made in 2019. Murray, who had resisted the film, came around to calling it probably the best work he had done.

The title became a dictionary entry for any situation that keeps repeating, invoked by everyone from Bill Clinton, addressing troops in Bosnia in 1996, to people describing pandemic lockdowns. Edge of Tomorrow, Happy Death Day, Palm Springs and Russian Doll all owe it the loop. Punxsutawney, which used to draw a few hundred people to its festival, drew more than 35,000 the year after the film, and Woodstock holds its own Groundhog Day, with plaques marking Ned's corner and the puddle Phil steps in. How long was Phil trapped? Ramis first said about ten years, then revised it to more like 30 or 40.