Best Time Loop Movies, Ranked (2026 Update)

Directed by Harold Ramis. Bill Murray wakes up as the same bitter weatherman in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, over and over again, until he figures out the thing he needs to figure out. You know the premise. Everyone knows the premise. The film has entered the language.

What's easy to forget is how odd the movie actually is. Ramis never explains the loop. There's no magical device, no inciting incident, no third-act reversal that fixes everything with a button press. The cure is just becoming a person worth something. That's a genuinely strange thing to build a studio comedy around, and it works completely.

Murray's performance is also better than it gets credit for. The despair phase — where he's tried everything and has nowhere left to go — runs darker than most people remember.

Groundhog Day earned over $105 million on a $14.6 million budget and won a BAFTA for Best Original Screenplay. Thirty-plus years later, it's still the film every entry on this list has to answer to.

Streaming: Rent/buy on Amazon, Apple TV, and Vudu.

Tom Cruise plays Major William Cage, a military PR guy with zero combat experience who gets thrown onto a beachhead invasion against aliens and dies within minutes. Then wakes up. Then dies again. Emily Blunt plays Sergeant Rita Vrataski, who went through the same thing and knows exactly what's happening to him.

This is the action version of the concept, and director Doug Liman understood that the loop needed to pull double duty as both a narrative mechanic and a comedy beat. Cage dies in increasingly stupid ways for a good chunk of the film. It's funny. Then it stops being funny, and the film earns that transition honestly.

Blunt is the better performance here — she plays someone who has been through all of this before and is tired of it in a way that Cage's confusion can't capture. The last act loses a step, but everything up to it is efficient and mean in the best way.

Streaming: Netflix (US).

Andy Samberg plays Nyles, a wedding guest who has been stuck in the same day for so long he's completely stopped caring about getting out. Cristin Milioti plays Sarah, the maid of honor who stumbles into his loop by accident. The film is less interested in the mechanics of escaping the loop than in the question of whether two people who are both kind of terrible can become worth something to each other.

J.K. Simmons is also there as a man who has been hunting Nyles for reasons that become clear, and he steals every scene he's in.

The movie premiered at Sundance in 2020 and sold for $22.5 million, a record at the time for the festival. It earned that. It's the version of Groundhog Day that takes the nihilism seriously before finding a way out of it, and the chemistry between Samberg and Milioti is real.

Streaming: Hulu and Disney+.

Duncan Jones (Moon) directed this one, and it's the tightest film on the list — 93 minutes, one location that matters, no wasted scenes. Jake Gyllenhaal plays Captain Colter Stevens, who wakes up in a stranger's body on a Chicago commuter train eight minutes before a bomb goes off. He has to find the bomber. Then the train explodes, and he wakes up again at the start of those eight minutes. Repeat.

The film uses the loop as a procedural. Stevens is a detective who happens to keep dying. But Jones layers in something underneath that — questions about consciousness, identity, and what exactly "survival" means — that give the ending more weight than you expect.

Vera Farmiga and Jeffrey Wright play his handlers on the other side of the program, and both are doing more with their limited screen time than the script strictly requires.

Source Code has only grown in reputation since 2011. If you haven't seen it, it's now free on Tubi, Pluto TV, and The Roku Channel. No excuse.

Streaming: Free on Tubi, Pluto TV, and The Roku Channel. Also on Prime Video.

Low budget. Eight people at a dinner party the night a comet passes over. Strange things start happening. I'm going to leave it there, because the less you know, the better this one lands.

Director James Ward Byrkit shot the film over five nights with no traditional script — actors were given character backgrounds and general direction each day and improvised from there. It shows, in the best way. The paranoia feels earned because the actors look genuinely confused and scared, because they often were.

It's not really a time loop movie in the traditional sense, but it belongs here because it plays with the same disorientation and dread. If you liked Coherence, the rabbit hole goes: Primer (2004), Synchronic (2019), and then honestly just stop and sleep.

Streaming: Available to rent on Amazon, Apple TV, and Vudu.

Rian Johnson's film gets categorized as time travel rather than time loop, but the central mechanic — Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) meeting his future self (Bruce Willis) and the two of them locked in a decision that keeps circling back — gives it the same DNA.

The worldbuilding is efficient and weird (future organized crime sends people back in time to be executed because it's cleaner than disposing of them in the future), and Johnson doesn't over-explain it. Willis plays a man willing to do something terrible to protect something he loves, and the film doesn't let him or us off the hook for that.

Streaming: Available to rent/buy on most major platforms.

A college student wakes up on her birthday, gets murdered, wakes up again on her birthday. Horror-comedy version of the concept, and it works better than it has any right to. Director Christopher Landon uses the slasher formula to do what Groundhog Day does — the protagonist is kind of awful, and the loop forces her to confront that — except the stakes are someone in a baby mask trying to kill her.

The sequel, Happy Death Day 2U (2019), goes fully weird with the concept in ways that are either delightful or too much depending on your tolerance for that kind of thing.

Streaming: Both films available on Peacock.

The outlier on this list. Zoey Deutch plays Samantha, a popular high school senior who relives the last day of her life. No aliens, no comedy, no thriller mechanics. Just a film asking whether a person can change before it's too late — and being genuinely uncertain about the answer.

It's quieter than everything else here and rewards patience. If you bounced off the more genre-forward entries, this one's worth trying.

Streaming: Available to rent on Amazon and Apple TV.