25 Movie Trivia Questions That Will Test Any Film Buff

Plenty of people love movies, but a true film buff tends to remember the details everyone else forgets. Character names, famous props, Oscar history, box-office records, memorable lines, and even fictional license plates can all become fair game.

Some of these questions should be easy if you have spent enough nights in front of a screen. Others dig deeper into film history. See how many you can answer before moving to the next slide for the reveal.

Alan Rickman played Hans Gruber opposite Bruce Willis in 1988's "Die Hard." Directed by John McTiernan, the movie helped turn Willis into an action star while giving Rickman one of the most memorable villain roles of the decade.

Hanks earned his first Academy Award nomination for playing an adult version of 12-year-old Josh Baskin in 1988's "Big." He lost Best Actor to Dustin Hoffman for "Rain Man," but Hanks would eventually win back-to-back Oscars for "Philadelphia" and "Forrest Gump."

Isla Nublar is the fictional island off the coast of Costa Rica where John Hammond builds Jurassic Park. Steven Spielberg directed the 1993 blockbuster, which was adapted from Michael Crichton's bestselling 1990 novel.

The endlessly repeated sentence provides one of the creepiest reveals in Stanley Kubrick's 1980 adaptation of Stephen King's novel. Jack Nicholson stars as Jack Torrance, whose stay as winter caretaker of the Overlook Hotel goes spectacularly wrong.

"Shrek" won the inaugural Best Animated Feature Oscar at the 2002 Academy Awards, beating "Monsters, Inc." and "Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius." DreamWorks' fairy-tale comedy was directed by Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson and featured Mike Myers as the voice of Shrek.

Quint takes Martin Brody and Matt Hooper aboard the Orca in their hunt for the great white shark terrorizing Amity Island. Steven Spielberg's 1975 thriller became a box-office phenomenon and helped establish the modern summer-blockbuster model.

Halle Berry made history at the 2002 Oscars when she won Best Actress for "Monster's Ball." The same ceremony also saw Denzel Washington win Best Actor for "Training Day."

The Sonny & Cher hit comes through Phil Connors' clock radio at 6 a.m. as he repeatedly wakes to the same February 2. Bill Murray stars in the 1993 comedy, which was directed and co-written by Harold Ramis.

Spielberg won his first Best Director Oscar for 1993's "Schindler's List." The film won seven Academy Awards in total, including Best Picture, Cinematography, Film Editing, Original Score, and Adapted Screenplay.

Doc Brown's time-traveling DeLorean carries the California vanity plate OUTATIME. Robert Zemeckis directed the 1985 favorite, with Michael J. Fox playing Marty McFly and Christopher Lloyd playing Doc Brown.

Brando delivers the famous line as former boxer Terry Malloy during the movie's taxi scene with his brother Charley. Elia Kazan's 1954 drama won eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor for Brando.

Christopher Nolan's "The Odyssey" took the R-rated box-office crown in 2026, passing "Deadpool & Wolverine" with more than $1.35 billion worldwide. The record had belonged to "Joker" when the original version of this quiz was written, making this one of the questions that badly needed an update.

HAL 9000 controls the Discovery One spacecraft in Stanley Kubrick's 1968 science-fiction classic. Canadian actor Douglas Rain supplied HAL's famously calm voice, which only makes the computer's behavior more unsettling.

Kate Winslet plays Rose DeWitt Bukater opposite Leonardo DiCaprio's Jack Dawson in James Cameron's 1997 blockbuster. "Titanic" went on to win 11 Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director.

"The Jazz Singer" was not literally the first movie ever made with sound, so the original question needed some nuance. The 1927 Al Jolson film was the first feature to include sequences of synchronized spoken dialogue and became the landmark hit that accelerated Hollywood's transition to talking pictures.

The crew of Ridley Scott's 1979 science-fiction horror film travels aboard the commercial towing vessel Nostromo. "Alien" also introduced audiences to Sigourney Weaver's Ellen Ripley, who became one of the defining characters of the franchise.

Robin Wright plays Jenny Curran, Forrest's childhood friend and lifelong love. Robert Zemeckis' 1994 movie won six Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Tom Hanks' second consecutive Best Actor Oscar.

"Red Dawn" became the first PG-13 movie to reach theaters when it opened on August 10, 1984. There is a trivia wrinkle here: "The Flamingo Kid" was reportedly the first film actually assigned the new rating, but "Red Dawn" was released first.

This answer changed again in October 2026. An encore theatrical release pushed "Avengers: Endgame" back past "Avatar," giving the Marvel epic roughly $2.93 billion in worldwide ticket sales. The two movies have traded the all-time crown more than once thanks to theatrical re-releases.

Tom Cruise's underwear-and-dress-shirt dance became the defining image of 1983's "Risky Business." The movie was written and directed by Paul Brickman and helped turn Cruise into one of Hollywood's biggest young stars.

"Annie Hall" won Best Picture at the 1978 Academy Awards, along with Oscars for Woody Allen's direction and screenplay and Diane Keaton's lead performance. The movie beat a Best Picture field that also included "Star Wars."

Depending on the presentation and whether overture and intermission material are counted, "Gone With the Wind" runs close to four hours. The 1939 epic won Best Picture and also produced a landmark Oscar win for Hattie McDaniel, the first Black performer to receive an Academy Award.

The Chinese animated blockbuster "Ne Zha 2" shattered records after its 2025 release, earning more than $2 billion worldwide. That makes the Mandarin-language sequel the highest-grossing non-English-language movie ever released and one of the biggest global box-office hits of any kind.

John Schlesinger's "Midnight Cowboy" won Best Picture at the 1970 Oscars while carrying an X rating. The Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight drama was later re-rated R in 1971, but it remains the only X-rated movie ever to take Hollywood's top Academy Award.

The names belong to the real Apollo 13 crew, not just Ron Howard's 1995 movie characters. Tom Hanks played commander Jim Lovell, Kevin Bacon portrayed command module pilot Jack Swigert, and Bill Paxton played lunar module pilot Fred Haise.