Bill Murray’s Phil Was Stuck Longer Than You Realized

Admittedly, while the unconfirmed and supernatural timeout on “Groundhog Day” sounds like torture, it certainly does make sense considering how much of a terrible person Phil Connors really is. Perhaps his sentence wasn’t quite that long, though. In fact, there was another occasion where Harold Ramis spoke about Phil’s punishment that disputes Stephen Tobolowsky’s story.

On the film’s own DVD commentary, Ramis reveals that when it came down to it, “We figure the day had been repeating for about 10 years.” However, Ramis also revealed that 10,000 was a number that was in an earlier draft of the story penned by Danny Rubin. “In Danny’s original script, believe it or not, Danny had him living the same day over and over again for 10,000 years, which is actually kind of a convenient Buddhist catchphrase,” Ramis explained. “Everything seems to take 10,000 years in Buddhism.”

By the sounds of things, Tobolowsky was right, even though Connors’ stretch stuck in Punxsutawney may have ultimately been shrunk down a little. Perhaps there’s a sweet spot in between those two possibilities. According to What Culture, if you include Phil’s variety of activities, from ice-sculpting to learning piano, saving falling children, and learning the Heimlich maneuver in between seeing films “hundreds of times,” Phil was stuck reliving the same Groundhog Day for 33 years and 350 days, leading to this inevitable clarification to be argued over, and over, and over, and … well, you get the idea.

Source: What Culture