Well, it’s Groundhog Day. Again. And that means we’re up here in our own private Gobbler’s Knobs, rewatching the classic Harold Ramis movie, starring Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell, about a selfish weatherman trapped in a time loop until he learns how to be of service to his fellow humans.
Which, in turn, means it’s time to ask the question that has sat in the minds of viewers since 1993: How many times does weatherman Phil Connors repeat the same day in his purgatorial Punxsutawney?
The question is repeatedly asked, but is not — cannot — be categorically answered. Screenwriter Danny Rubin has one vague answer. Ramis had another, which he changed. The studio had a third. And an army of online sleuths think they’ve got it figured out, too, often based on the most tenuous theories of how long it takes to master skills like ice sculpting. (This is the internet, after all.)
Like every other movie fan, I have my own preferred answer. But in the spirit of service, I present it in the context of every major answer ever mooted, and what evidence that answer relies upon. Beginning with the only one that cannot be true anymore:
14 days
Columbia Pictures’ notes on the movie included a request that the number of days in Phil’s time loop be cut way down. “According to them, Phil couldn’t be stuck in the time loop for longer than two weeks because it was just too much for the audience to handle,” Danny Rubin says in How to Write Groundhog Day (a highly entertaining book on how the movie came into existence and was shepherded by many parents).
This was, after all, a way less nerdy era. Most U.S. audiences had never come across Doctor Who or time travel tropes in general. I can’t have been the only viewer to have watched it with an American family that was initially baffled by the bar scene, the first of many in the film that repeats dialogue multiple times. Keeping the total number of days to 14 may, in a 1990s studio exec’s thinking, have been more palatable to the average sitcom audience.
Luckily, Harold Ramis stuck to his guns, and produced a movie in which the answer is more ambiguous — but definitely longer than two weeks.
Between 34 and 44 days
The first step in figuring out Phil’s time loop is to answer an apparently simple question: How many Groundhog Days are shown on screen? But the answer is not as clear as you might think. You find yourself forced to make many interpretations about the available evidence. For example:
Does Phil sabotage the TV van to keep Rita in town the same day he hits on her while stuffing his face in the diner, or is that the next day? Does Rita slap Phil’s face, rebuffing his desperate advances, once per day or multiple times a day? (There are eight slaps in total.) Does he smash his bedside clock for the third and final time the day before he kidnaps the groundhog, or the same day? Is his corpse in the morgue the same Phil that fell from the tower (it’s unusually clean if so)? Is the day Phil brings coffee and pastries to his crew the same day he’s sitting in the diner reading and listening to Rachmaninov, and is that also the same day he starts piano lessons?
By my count, the most miserly interpretation of the visual evidence is 34 days. The most expansive is 44 days. But if we tweak the count just a little in our interpretation of the above questions, we get to my favorite answer of all.
42 days
This is also the number you get if you take one popular online account of number of days on screen (36), and add the number of suicide attempts Phil mentions but are not seen (“stabbed, shot, poisoned, frozen, hung…burned”).
To stop the count at 42, you’d have to assume that Phil was a natural at the various skills he develops (the perfect robbery, card-tossing, ice sculpture, piano). But there is still a certain poetry in sticking to 42, and not just because it’s Douglas Adams’ answer to the ultimate question of Life, the Universe and Everything.
Why? Because 42 days is six weeks. And what did the groundhog predict? Six more weeks of winter.
In a movie with more than its fair share of poetry quotes, a movie obsessed with just desserts, this is at least the most poetical and judicious answer.
8 years, 8 months, 16 days
This was the first major online estimate, one that hails from a widely-cited post on a blog named Wolf Gnards in 2008. It’s also the first to include some creative accounting. Sure, Phil estimates his card-tossing skills as requiring at least six months to master, so that helps. But how long does it take to master the piano or ice sculpting? This being years before the popular “10,000 hours” theory of skill mastery gained hold in the public mind, Wolf Gnards ballparks the figure at three years apiece.
Ironically, the 10,000-hour skill-learning estimate — which was only ever supposed to be an average — comes from a paper published the same year as Groundhog Day, 1993. But it wasn’t popularized until Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers published at the end of 2008.
Ten years
This was Harold Ramis’ figure that he had in his mind during shooting, the director (who died in 2014) said in his DVD commentary. However, Ramis upped his number in the wake of the Wolf Gnards estimate. “Allotting for the downtime and misguided years he spent, it had to be more like 30 or 40 years,” Ramis told Heeb magazine. Which puts the total more in line with…
33 years, 350 days
In 2011, a WhatCulture editor made his own estimate that has been widely reported every year since. This time the 10,000-hour skill-learning concept was applied, as was an estimate of how long it would take Phil to plan the robbery, and taking him literally on one scene where he says he’d seen the fake movie “Heidi 2” a hundred times.
‘More than one lifetime’
This is as close to a definitive answer as Danny Rubin gives us. His original intention, which Ramis nixed, was to have scenes showing Phil reading one page a day from an entire wall of books at his bed & breakfast, in order of placement — then starting over again at the first book.
“We already have plenty of stories generated by characters who have lived one lifetime,” Rubin writes. “I wanted to see what more time would provide… It wasn’t important to me exactly how long it was, only that it exceeded a single lifetime.”
Ultimately, Rubin was delighted by Ramis’ more ambiguous screen version. And it’s probably a good idea that the bookshelf scene was lost, or we’d have internet nerds spending years identifying and counting the page length of every book Phil reads.
10,000 years
This also wouldn’t be the internet if fake news didn’t circulate on a popular topic. The most false, when it comes to Groundhog Day, is the widely-reported notion that an early version of Rubin’s script had Phil explicitly saying to Rita that he had been “waiting for you every day for 10,000 years.”
Rubin was delighted by the idea that he’d written this even as he destroyed it: “I find that so incredibly cool that I put no effort into disputing it,” Rubin wrote on his blog in 2008. “But it’s not true.”
On his way to demolishing it, Rubin pauses to note that the figure of 10,000 years has “Buddhist overtones.” Which is true — it’s the length of the “third period in the life span of the dharma” before the Buddha will supposedly return to Earth in a new form.
So perhaps it’s not surprising that this fake news would swirl around a movie that has seen many religious interpretations. In 2003, Ramis told the New York Times that Christian ministers contacted him first — purgatory and redemption being an important part of various church doctrines — and rabbis called next, and Buddhists after that.
Whichever doctrine you apply to Groundhog Day, then, it seems possible that religious scholars will still be arguing about the movie — and coming up with new estimates for the amount of time it shows — in another hundred centuries’ time.