2023 Movie Trivia
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79 free 2023 Movie trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
2023 was the year Barbie and Oppenheimer opened on the same day and both became phenomena, the year a Mario movie made more than a billion dollars, and the year a string of superhero and franchise blockbusters flopped so hard that critics coined a new word for it. It was also a strong year for everything else: Poor Things, Killers of the Flower Moon, Past Lives, Anatomy of a Fall, The Holdovers, Godzilla Minus One and a Miyazaki film released in Japan with no trailer at all. This quiz has 79 questions on all of it: box office records, casting, directors, the Cannes and Venice prizes, what won at the 96th Academy Awards, the writers' and actors' strikes, and the smaller films that found audiences, from Talk to Me and Bottoms to Saltburn and The Iron Claw. Some are easy (who played Ken, what Nolan's film was about); some are properly hard (which studio spent a record sum in Oklahoma, which film had the longest runtime of any American animated feature). Every answer has been checked against a source, and each question shows its explanation and citation once you answer.
30 of 79 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which star of a rival summer blockbuster posted photos of his tickets to both Barbie and Oppenheimer in June 2023?
Tom Cruise
Tom Cruise tweeted the photos with his Mission: Impossible director, and Barbie's director and star replied by posing with tickets to his film.
Q 02Who directed Barbie, from a script co-written with her husband Noah Baumbach?
Greta Gerwig
Greta Gerwig came aboard only after versions built around Amy Schumer and then Anne Hathaway had fallen apart at another studio, whose option on the doll expired in 2018.
Q 03Who played Ken opposite Margot Robbie in Barbie?
Ryan Gosling
Ryan Gosling first passed on the part, but he was the film-makers' only choice and they refused to take no for an answer until a gap opened in his schedule.
Q 04Barbie overtook the last film of which series as the highest-grossing release from the studio behind both?
Harry Potter
Harry Potter. Deathly Hallows Part 2 had been the studio's top earner since 2011, and Barbie only landed there because Sony let its option on the doll lapse in 2018.
Q 05Which song from Barbie won the Academy Award for Best Original Song?
What Was I Made For?
What Was I Made For? ended a long dry spell for Billie Eilish and her brother Finneas, who began writing it the day after the director showed them a rough cut of the film.
Q 06Oppenheimer was based on which Pulitzer-winning 2005 biography?
American Prometheus
American Prometheus took 25 years: Martin Sherwin signed the contract in 1980 expecting to need five, and finished only after Kai Bird joined him as co-author.
Q 07Who plays Lewis Strauss, the Atomic Energy Commission member, in Oppenheimer?
Robert Downey Jr.
Robert Downey Jr. took a steep pay cut for the supporting part, a reported $4 million against his usual eight-figure fee, and it brought him his first Oscar.
Q 08Which studio, Christopher Nolan's home since 2002, did he leave before making Oppenheimer?
Warner Bros.
Warner Bros. had released every Nolan film since Insomnia in 2002, but he left after it announced its whole 2021 slate would reach HBO Max the same day as cinemas.
Q 09Which company had to specially manufacture the first black-and-white IMAX film stock for Oppenheimer?
Kodak
Kodak made its Double-X black-and-white stock in the 65 mm IMAX gauge for the first time, because Nolan wanted monochrome for the scenes told from outside Oppenheimer's own point of view.
Q 10Oppenheimer's seven Oscars included Best Actor for which of its stars?
Cillian Murphy
Cillian Murphy had appeared in five earlier Christopher Nolan films without once playing the lead, and the win made him the first Irish-born Best Actor.
Q 11Oppenheimer overtook which film as the highest-grossing World War II movie ever?
Dunkirk
Dunkirk. The record Oppenheimer broke was its own director's: Nolan's 2017 evacuation epic had taken more than half a billion dollars worldwide.
Q 12Which studio produced the 2023 Super Mario Bros. film together with Nintendo?
Illumination
Illumination got the job after Mario's creator, Shigeru Miyamoto, was introduced to its chief, Chris Meledandri, through Nintendo's theme-park partnership with Universal.
Q 13Who voices Bowser in the 2023 Super Mario Bros. film?
Jack Black
Jack Black was wary of singing in the film until he was offered a love song, and he co-wrote Peaches, Bowser's ballad to the princess.
Q 21Poor Things won the top prize at which 2023 film festival?
Venice
Venice gave it the Golden Lion in September 2023, the month it was meant to open; by then the studio had pushed the release back to December.
Q 22Which film won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2023?
Anatomy of a Fall
Anatomy of a Fall was then passed over as its home country's Oscar entry in favour of The Taste of Things, yet it earned five nominations and won for its screenplay.
Q 23Which actress led two of the ten Best Picture nominees of 2023, including The Zone of Interest?
Sandra Hüller
Sandra Hüller had long shied away from Holocaust films, and was first sent a scene of a couple arguing with no hint of the setting; her own dog plays the family's pet.
Q 14The 2023 Super Mario Bros. film became the first movie of what kind to gross $1 billion worldwide?
A video game adaptation
A video game adaptation had never reached $1 billion before; this one got there in 26 days, thirty years after the live-action Super Mario Bros. flopped.
Q 15Which 2023 release became the longest animated film from an American studio, at 140 minutes?
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is still only half a story: its writers found they had written two films' worth, so the 140-minute cut stops on a cliffhanger.
Q 16Who voices Miles Morales in Across the Spider-Verse?
Shameik Moore
Shameik Moore's Miles shares the lead with Hailee Steinfeld's Gwen Stacy, because the sequel was built around their relationship and grew into two films.
Q 17Killers of the Flower Moon is set among which Native American nation after oil was found on its land?
The Osage
The Osage had kept the mineral rights to their reservation, and the oil royalties made them so wealthy that outsiders plotted, and even murdered, to get at the money.
Q 18Which tech company financed Killers of the Flower Moon and released it with Paramount?
Apple
Apple stepped in when Paramount grew nervous about a price tag near $200 million, and the studio stayed on only to handle the cinema release.
Q 19Which film brought De Niro's first Oscar nomination, 49 years before Killers of the Flower Moon?
The Godfather Part II
The Godfather Part II. De Niro had been hired for a small part in the first film but asked to be released for another job, which left him free to play the young Vito Corleone and win.
Q 20In Poor Things, Emma Stone plays Bella Baxter, a woman reanimated by a scientist played by whom?
Willem Dafoe
Willem Dafoe spent about six hours a day in the make-up chair for the role: four to have the scarred prosthetic face applied and two to get it off.
Q 24The Zone of Interest depicts the family life of the commandant of which concentration camp?
Auschwitz
Auschwitz. Glazer hid up to ten remotely operated cameras around a house by the camp wall and kept the crew out of the rooms, so the actors could live the family's routine unobserved.
Q 25Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 centres on the origin of which character?
Rocket
Rocket is the Guardian James Gunn says he identifies with; Disney fired Gunn from the film in 2018 over old tweets, then reversed course within months.
Q 26Which martial-arts star plays Caine, the blind assassin sent after his old friend in John Wick: Chapter 4?
Donnie Yen
Donnie Yen's Caine takes the job only because his daughter's life is threatened; the blind swordsman is a nod to Japan's long-running Zatoichi films.
Q 27In The Holdovers, Paul Giamatti's teacher is stuck at a boarding school over which 1970 holiday?
Christmas
Christmas. Alexander Payne wanted the film to look as if it had been made in 1970, yet it was shot digitally, with the look of old film stock and the retro studio logos added afterwards.
Q 28Godzilla Minus One won an Oscar in which category, the first non-English-language film ever to do so?
Best Visual Effects
Best Visual Effects. Director Takashi Yamazaki supervised the effects himself, and a team of just 35 artists made all 610 shots for a film that cost under $15 million.
Q 29The hero of Godzilla Minus One is a former what, haunted by his failure to complete his mission?
Kamikaze pilot
Kamikaze pilot Koichi Shikishima fakes engine trouble to escape his mission, then freezes when Godzilla attacks his island base, and spends the film trying to atone.
Q 30Past Lives, Celine Song's debut about two childhood friends from Seoul, had which distributor?
A24
A24 released Celine Song's first film, which she drew from her own life: her family left South Korea when she was 12, and she later married an American writer.