Hollywood
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
8correct to beat the crowd
142 free Hollywood trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
49 free Hollywood trivia questions with answers. Think you know Hollywood? From the silent era to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the entertainment capital of the world has produced countless iconic moments, legendary performances, and record-breaking films. Put your movie knowledge to the test with 142 questions spanning Hollywood's rich history — covering everything from Oscar trivia and box office records to behind-the-scenes secrets and film industry milestones.
30 of 142 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which silent film about First World War fighter pilots won the first Academy Award for Best Picture?
Wings
Wings won the top prize, then called Outstanding Picture, in 1929; it was long thought a lost film until a print turned up in the Cinémathèque Française archive in Paris.
Q 02Which film lost the box-office record to Avengers: Endgame in 2019, then won it back with a 2021 re-release?
Avatar
Avatar took the record back in March 2021, when a re-release in China lifted its total past that of Avengers: Endgame; it had first claimed the title in 2010.
Q 03Which actor has won the most Academy Awards for Best Actor?
Daniel Day-Lewis
Daniel Day-Lewis is the only man with three Best Actor Oscars, for My Left Foot, There Will Be Blood and Lincoln; around 1999 he left acting for a time to work as a shoemaker's apprentice in Italy.
Q 04What was the first feature-length film to use synchronized dialogue throughout?
Lights of New York
Lights of New York (1928) was the first all-talking feature; the famous 1927 part-talkie that preceded it had only a handful of synchronized dialogue scenes inside an otherwise silent picture.
Q 05Which film was Hollywood's first full-length cel-animated feature?
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs cost about $1.5 million, some six times its first estimate; its honorary Oscar came as one full-size statuette and seven miniature ones.
Q 06Erected in 1923 as a temporary advert for a housing development, what did the Hollywood Sign originally spell?
HOLLYWOODLAND
HOLLYWOODLAND was the name of the hillside housing development it advertised; the sign was left up as it grew famous, and the last four letters came down in 1949.
Q 07Which actress holds the record for the most Academy Award nominations?
Meryl Streep
Meryl Streep has 21 acting nominations and three wins; the first nod came for The Deer Hunter, a small part she took to stay close to her partner John Cazale, who had lung cancer.
Q 08Which 1939 film does the Library of Congress name as the most-seen in cinema history?
The Wizard of Oz
The Wizard of Oz owes that title to television: first aired by CBS in 1956, it became an annual broadcast from 1959 to 1991 and so reached more viewers than any other film.
Q 09Which film was the first to earn $1 billion at the worldwide box office?
Titanic
Titanic was the first film to gross $1 billion, despite a troubled shoot that pushed its release from July to December 1997 and its budget to a record $200 million.
Q 10Which director of classic Westerns holds the record of four Best Director Oscars?
John Ford
John Ford won for The Informer, The Grapes of Wrath, How Green Was My Valley and The Quiet Man, so not one of his record four Oscars came for a Western.
Q 11In which year was the Academy Awards ceremony first shown on television?
1953
The 25th Academy Awards on 19 March 1953 were the first televised: NBC paid the Academy $100,000 for the rights, and the show ran simultaneously from Hollywood and New York.
Q 12Which film studio is the oldest major Hollywood studio still in operation?
Universal Pictures
Universal Pictures dates from 30 April 1912; in 1915 founder Carl Laemmle opened Universal City and let the public in to watch films being shot, the seed of today's studio tour.
Q 13Who became the first African American to win an Academy Award, in 1940?
Hattie McDaniel
Hattie McDaniel won Best Supporting Actress, yet at the ceremony in a Los Angeles hotel she was made to sit at a separate table, apart from her white co-stars.
Q 21Which actress holds the record of four Academy Awards for acting?
Katharine Hepburn
Katharine Hepburn won four Best Actress Oscars, from Morning Glory (1933) to On Golden Pond (1981), and did not attend a single ceremony to collect one.
Q 22Which 'Big Five' studio of Hollywood's golden age made King Kong and Citizen Kane before collapsing in the 1950s?
RKO
RKO stopped making films in 1957 after years of decline under Howard Hughes; its studios were then bought by Desilu, the company of Lucille Ball, once an RKO contract player.
Q 23Which rating was created in 1984 after complaints about violence in Gremlins and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom?
PG-13
Q 14Which Best Picture winner runs longest of all, at nearly four hours with its overture and intermission?
Gone with the Wind
Gone with the Wind runs close to four hours with its overture and intermission; the burning of Atlanta was filmed first, in December 1938, before the role of Scarlett had even been cast.
Q 15Which 1927 Al Jolson film is counted as the first feature 'talkie', even though most of it is silent?
The Jazz Singer
The Jazz Singer tells most of its story with silent title cards over a recorded score: only the songs and a few scenes of talk are synchronised, and the talk opens with Jolson's stage catchphrase, 'You ain't heard nothin' yet'.
Q 16Which film gave Pixar its first Academy Award for Best Animated Feature?
Finding Nemo
Finding Nemo won for 2003; the category was new for 2001, when Shrek beat Pixar's Monsters, Inc., and Toy Story had earned only a special achievement Oscar years before.
Q 17Which film first used digital image processing, pixellating footage for an android's point of view?
Westworld
Westworld (1973) shows its robot gunslinger's view in blocky pixels; when a NASA lab quoted nine months for two minutes of footage, the makers instead worked nights on a private firm's computers.
Q 18Who is the youngest person to win a competitive Academy Award?
Tatum O'Neal
Tatum O'Neal was 10 when Paper Moon (1973) won her Best Supporting Actress, the youngest competitive winner ever; Shirley Temple's statuette at age 6 was an honorary juvenile award.
Q 19Harry, Albert, Sam and Jack founded which Hollywood studio, incorporated in 1923?
Warner Bros.
Warner Bros. was incorporated on 4 April 1923; in 1956 Jack, the youngest, talked Harry and Albert into a joint sale of their shares, then secretly bought control himself.
Q 20What was the first sequel to win the Academy Award for Best Picture?
The Godfather Part II
The Godfather Part II won six Oscars in all, one of them for Robert De Niro, who plays the young Vito Corleone almost entirely in Sicilian.
PG-13 took effect on 1 July 1984, and Red Dawn that August was the first film released with it; the two blockbusters that provoked the rating both kept their plain PG.
Q 24Which film's director kept merchandising and sequel rights, creating Hollywood's modern franchise model?
Star Wars
Star Wars (1977): George Lucas traded salary for merchandising and sequel rights, and the toys, sequels and licensing that followed became the template for every modern Hollywood franchise.
Q 25Who was the first woman to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director?
Lina Wertmüller
Italian director Lina Wertmüller was the first woman nominated for Best Director for Seven Beauties (1976). Kathryn Bigelow later became the first woman to win the award for The Hurt Locker (2009).
Q 26Which studio produced Iron Man (2008), the first film of a shared cinematic universe?
Marvel Studios
Marvel Studios financed Iron Man itself, borrowing $525 million from Merrill Lynch against the film rights to ten of its characters; Disney bought Marvel only at the end of 2009.
Q 27What is the dying word of Charles Foster Kane in Citizen Kane?
Rosebud
Rosebud sends a reporter hunting for its meaning, but only the audience ever learns it: the name painted on Kane's childhood sled, thrown into a furnace in the final scene.
Q 28Which director was famous for slipping fleeting cameo appearances into most of his own films?
Alfred Hitchcock
Alfred Hitchcock appears in about 40 of his films; in Lifeboat, set entirely in one small boat, he turns up in a newspaper advertisement for a weight-loss product.
Q 29The Supreme Court's 1948 antitrust ruling against the Hollywood studios forced them to sell off what?
Their theater chains
Their theater chains: the Court ruled that owning cinemas and block-booking films into them was an illegal monopoly, and losing those guaranteed screens helped to end the old studio system.
Q 30Which 1994 Arnold Schwarzenegger film was the first to cost $100 million to make?
True Lies
True Lies broke the record its own director, James Cameron, had set three years earlier with Terminator 2, until then the most expensive film ever made.