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‘Groundhog Day’ Sequel in Works — But It’s a VR Game, Not a Movie

“Groundhog Day: Like Father, Like Son,” drops players into a reoccurring day in the life of Phil Connors Jr., the son of the eventually affable Phil Connors and Rita Hanson from the 1993 film. As with the movie, the game has the player stuck in a single day, trapped in Connors’ home in Punxsutawney until the son, like the father did before him, learns the value of friends and family.

The game is Sony Pictures Virtual Reality’s first foray into branching narratives and interactive storytelling in a VR game. What it isn’t is some sort of preamble or marketing ploy for a film sequel.

“We are not developing a new ‘Groundhog Day’ movie,” Jake Zim, senior vice president of the Sony Pictures VR group, told Variety. “This is us expanding the storyline into a new format. We’ve taken ‘Groundhog Day’ and put it into a musical, now we’re putting it into an immersive experience.”

The conceit behind Sony Pictures VR is to build out a profitable business around immersive entertainment, Zim said.

“When we launched this business three years ago, we thought we would build small bite-sized games with movie IPs and see what price point we could get up to,” Zim said. “But we learned that wasn’t what the audience wanted.

“‘Groundhog Day’ is a real attempt to make a real game.”

Tequila Works, based in Madrid, Spain, is an indie studio with a solid reputation that had already worked on a virtual reality game with a complex intertwined narrative.

Zim said the full playthrough will likely be about eight hours.

See the full story here: https://variety.com/2019/film/news/groundhog-day-sequel-game-1203126479/