Avatar (2009 Film) Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
8correct to beat the crowd
50 free Avatar (2009 Film) trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Avatar is James Cameron's 2009 science fiction epic about Jake Sully, a paraplegic Marine who pilots a genetically engineered Na'vi body on the moon Pandora and ends up siding with the Omaticaya clan against the mining company that sent him. Written in treatment form in 1994 and shelved until motion-capture technology caught up, it became the first film to gross $2 billion and took home three Academy Awards from nine nominations. This quiz covers the cast and characters, the long road to production (the proof-of-concept clip, the actors who nearly played Jake, the studio that almost walked away), the technology behind Pandora, the Na'vi language, the marketing blitz, the box-office records and the awards. It also picks through the stranger details: the plant-based catering, the oil platform the designers measured, and the lawsuit from a fantasy artist. Fifty questions, four options each, with a short explanation after every answer. Play through on your phone or print it for movie night.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Who wrote and directed the 2009 film Avatar?
James Cameron
James Cameron drafted Avatar in the mid-1990s, then shelved it for years until visual-effects technology could put what he imagined on screen.
Q 02Who plays Jake Sully in Avatar?
Sam Worthington
Sam Worthington, then little known, grew so fed up with months of secretive auditions that he lost his temper on camera, and that anger is what caught the director's eye.
Q 03Which actress plays Neytiri in Avatar?
Zoe Saldaña
Zoe Saldaña was cast first, so the actors up for the male lead had to play scenes opposite her before the director chose her eventual co-star.
Q 04In Avatar, what valuable mineral are the humans mining on Pandora?
Unobtanium
Unobtanium borrows an old engineers' joke: since the 1950s, 'unobtainium' has meant any material that would solve a design problem perfectly, if only it existed.
Q 05In Avatar, Pandora is a moon in which real star system?
Alpha Centauri
Alpha Centauri is the Sun's nearest neighbouring star system, and when the film came out a Harvard astronomer said a real moon like Pandora there could be detected within a decade.
Q 06Whose avatar does Jake Sully take over?
His twin's
His twin's avatar: Tommy, a scientist, was killed by a mugger before he could ship out, and since each costly avatar is genetically matched to one operator, only an identical twin could take it over.
Q 07Who plays Colonel Miles Quaritch in Avatar?
Stephen Lang
Stephen Lang had tried out for the director's Aliens some twenty years earlier and lost the part, but the director never forgot him and cast him as the colonel.
Q 08Which character does Sigourney Weaver play in the 2009 film Avatar?
Grace Augustine
Grace Augustine runs the Avatar Program, and to play her Weaver sat down with a university botanist to learn how a field scientist would sample an alien forest.
Q 09In Avatar, Jake Sully is initiated into which Na'vi clan?
Omaticaya
The Omaticaya come to accept Jake as one of the People, then bind him as a traitor when he admits he was sent among them as a spy.
Q 10In Avatar, who is Neytiri's mother and her clan's spiritual leader?
Mo'at
Mo'at orders her daughter to teach Jake the clan's ways, and when the clan later binds him as a traitor it is she who cuts him loose, pleading with him to help them.
Q 11In Avatar, Wes Studi plays which clan chief, Neytiri's father?
Eytukan
Eytukan is killed in the mining company's assault on his people, and the warrior Tsu'tey, his chosen heir, takes over as chief.
Q 12In Avatar, Jake regains the clan's trust by bonding with which feared flying creature?
Toruk
Toruk means 'last shadow', and Jake masters it by dropping onto its back from above, betting that the sky's top predator never bothers to look up.
Q 13In Avatar, what is the name of the Na'vi's mother goddess?
Eywa
Eywa seems to answer Jake's prayer in the final battle, when Pandora's wild animals swarm the human forces and turn a losing fight around.
Q 21Who sang Avatar's theme song, "I See You"?
Leona Lewis
Leona Lewis sings it over the closing credits, though it came from the film's own composer and the producer of Celine Dion's My Heart Will Go On.
Q 22The linguist who invented Avatar's Na'vi language vowed to outdo which famous alien tongue?
Klingon
Klingon was the bar: USC linguist Paul Frommer told the director they would 'out-Klingon Klingon' with a more detailed and better thought-out language.
Q 23In Avatar, what does Colonel Quaritch promise Jake in return for intelligence on the Na'vi?
Surgery to restore his legs
Surgery to restore his legs is the colonel's price for a spy among the Na'vi, and Jake goes along with it until his loyalty shifts to the people he was sent to watch.
Q 14In Avatar, the mining company's gunships bring down which giant tree in a storm of missiles?
Hometree
Hometree falls in flames and ash, and the director said afterwards that he was surprised by how much the scene ended up looking like September 11.
Q 15Which film beat Avatar to Best Picture?
The Hurt Locker
The Hurt Locker cost about $15 million against Avatar's official $237 million, roughly a sixteenth, yet it won six Oscars to Avatar's three.
Q 16In Avatar, what do the Na'vi call the humans who have come to Pandora?
Sky People
Sky People, Neytiri tells Jake early on, cannot learn because they do not See, and he spends the rest of the film proving her wrong.
Q 17Which awards gave Avatar their top film prize in 2010?
Golden Globes
Golden Globes voters gave Avatar both best drama and best director in January 2010, but seven weeks later the Oscars handed both of those prizes to a rival.
Q 18Avatar won three Oscars, for visual effects, art direction and which other category?
Best Cinematography
Best Cinematography went to Mauro Fiore, even though the director had estimated that about 60% of the film would be computer-generated rather than photographed.
Q 19Which genre-film awards did Avatar sweep with ten wins from ten nominations?
Saturn Awards
Saturn Awards voters gave Avatar's cast four acting prizes, one of them for a character made entirely of computer graphics, though the Oscars had not nominated a single one of its actors.
Q 20Who composed the score for Avatar?
James Horner
James Horner had already scored the director's Aliens, yet he called Avatar the most difficult job he had ever done.
Q 24Which visual-effects studio led the work on Avatar?
Weta Digital
Weta Digital had so much left to finish that a second effects house, Industrial Light & Magic, was called in late to help complete the aircraft and final-battle shots.
Q 25Avatar's director says seeing which digital character on screen helped persuade him his film was finally possible?
Gollum
Gollum, and after him King Kong and Davy Jones, showed that a computer-generated character could hold the screen, so the script shelved in the 1990s was dusted off.
Q 26Before he reaches Pandora in Avatar, Jake Sully served in which branch of the US military?
The Marines
The Marines are why the security chief, an old Recon man himself, trusts Jake to gather intelligence that the scientists never would.
Q 27Which sequel to Avatar finally reached cinemas in 2022, thirteen years after the original?
The Way of Water
The Way of Water was first aimed at 2014, but the director wanted to film motion capture underwater, and inventing a way to do it helped push the release back eight years.
Q 28In Avatar, why can't humans breathe the air on Pandora?
It is poisonous to them
It is poisonous to them within minutes, which is how the colonel nearly wins the final fight: he smashes open the unit that holds Jake's sleeping human body.
Q 29Avatar's director spent years with Vince Pace developing the Fusion Camera System to shoot in which format?
Digital 3D
Digital 3D was something the director had first tried out on two deep-sea documentaries, using earlier versions of the same camera rig, before trusting it with a feature.
Q 30Which star says he turned down the lead in Avatar, and with it a tenth of the film's profits?
Matt Damon
Matt Damon says he passed because he was committed to a Bourne film, though the director has since insisted he never formally offered him the part.