I have a quirk where I try to estimate and compare the number of cycles of Groundhog Day stories. I don’t include simple time travel loops like Back to the Future or Harry Potter. Here’s my list in order of increasing estimates of loops. Thoughts? Additions?
- Happy Death Day -- no real indication there are a large number of days we don't see, and she carries remnants of the injuries forward, which limits the loop count. Maybe several dozen total?
- Boss Level -- he definitely has several "I failed at this more times than you know" moments, but not much skill development like GD, so maybe thousands?
- Groundhog Day -- I've seen estimates around 10-20K days, which seems reasonable. He learns languages, acquires multiple skills, and has many "this is my hundredth time perfecting this" moments.
- Edge of Tomorrow -- hard to estimate: arguing for less days, Tom Cruise doesn't seem to be very affected by the experience, meaning he gets frustrated at dying, works to improve, levels up, and that's it — compare this to Bill Murray’s multiple existential crises in GD. There are a few scenes that likely involved many failed attempts, like going back on base and not getting caught, but maybe not as many as GD? Arguing for more days, obviously it takes time to get as good as he does at fighting. But I'm estimating in the same ballpark, maybe 10-20k days.
- The Map of Tiny Perfect Things -- not many new skills, but a ton of "this took many many failed tries" moments. Maybe 20-50k?
- Palm Springs -- a lot: he's repeated enough times to figure out how to seduce basically everyone around, and he has multiple "I practiced this endlessly" moments. Also, he has become very close friends with many people, which takes longer because he has to start over each day, meaning that from their perspective, he's had to talk people into telling him their most personal details within hours of meeting him. And most tellingly -- he's entirely lost track of how long it's been, to the point of having clear amnesia about it. I'm guessing multiple lifetimes' worth of days, maybe > 100,000 days.
- Dr. Strange -- hard to say, but my head canon is that part of why he's so skilled at magic is that he faced Dormammu millions or billions of times and was able to trial-and-error his way through all the obscure bits of magic. Arguing against this is the idea that Dormammu isn't an idiot. He'd want to be sure Strange has no mental weaknesses to exploit, but after the first several hundred or thousand loops, would know that it was pointless to draw out the conflict. Also there's the What If? Reality -- clearly Dark Strange is more skilled/powerful than Main Strange, having gone through his own sequence. But that might not be numbers, it could be because he had access to magics Main Strange couldn't access stuck in a loop in the dark dimension. So anywhere from a few hundred minimum for Main Strange up to (for one or the other of them) hundreds of thousands, maybe many millions or billions, of iterations.
- Heaven Sent (Doctor Who) — “2 billion years.” Uncertain whether it’s one loop per day, or more or less, but this probably takes the crown for most iterations, with the possible exception of the next on the list.
- ARQ -- that we see, not so many, maybe hundreds? Thousands? But there's the outside loop/reset at the end, so who knows how many times that has happened, and it seems unbreakable, so anywhere from hundreds to infinity.
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source https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/r3lf5p/groundhog_daystyle_movie_loop_estimates/
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