Paramount Pictures Trivia
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58 free Paramount Pictures trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Paramount Pictures trivia quiz covers more than a century of the studio with the mountain logo. It starts with the basics any movie fan should know: the year it was founded, the franchises it owns, the famous Melrose Avenue lot and the Best Picture winners in its library. From there it digs into the founding story, from Adolph Zukor's Famous Players and Jesse Lasky's rented horse barn to W. W. Hodkinson sketching a Utah peak on a napkin. The harder questions are for film-history buffs: block booking and the 1948 Supreme Court case that ended the studio system, the Fleischer cartoons, the Gulf+Western years under Charles Bluhdorn and Robert Evans, Barry Diller's team of future moguls, the Desilu purchase that brought Star Trek in the door, the Viacom bidding war, DreamWorks, and the 2025 Skydance merger. There is also a run of questions on the logo itself, whose star count and mountain have changed more than most people realise. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries for the studio, its founders and its landmark films, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, try our Hollywood, Star Trek and Best Picture quizzes next.
30 of 58 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Famous Players star was billed as America's Sweetheart?
Mary Pickford
Mary Pickford was so valuable that in 1916 Famous Players gave her a production company of her own, with authority over the films she starred in.
Q 02Which studio is the only surviving American film studio older than Paramount?
Universal Pictures
Universal Pictures is the only surviving American studio older than Paramount; Carl Laemmle formed it in 1912 by merging independent producers that had fought the Motion Picture Patents Company's monopoly.
Q 03Which Hitchcock thriller did a reluctant Paramount release after he shot it cheaply with his television crew?
Psycho
Psycho was shot in black and white by the crew of Alfred Hitchcock Presents; Hitchcock swapped his director's fee for 60 percent ownership of the film.
Q 04Which silent-era heartthrob played the title role in Paramount's 1921 desert romance The Sheik?
Rudolph Valentino
Rudolph Valentino became the screen's great lover as Sheik Ahmed; when he died suddenly in 1926, aged 31, crowds rioted outside the New York funeral home where he lay in state.
Q 05Which legendary French actress starred in Queen Elizabeth, the first film Famous Players released?
Sarah Bernhardt
Sarah Bernhardt starred in the French-made Queen Elizabeth; its American run in 1912 made a fortune that bankrolled Famous Players' plan to film Broadway stars in their stage hits.
Q 06Which future mogul, then a glove salesman, co-founded the Lasky Feature Play Company with his brother-in-law Jesse Lasky?
Samuel Goldwyn
Samuel Goldwyn, still called Goldfish, co-founded the company in 1913; his later Goldwyn Pictures was folded into Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1924, yet he never worked there, producing independently instead.
Q 07Which director made the Lasky company's first feature in a rented Hollywood horse barn?
Cecil B. DeMille
Cecil B. DeMille rented half of a working barn to shoot The Squaw Man in 1913; the studio later hauled the building to its new lot, and it survives today as a Hollywood film museum.
Q 08Which comedy team made its first five films, from The Cocoanuts to Duck Soup, at Paramount?
The Marx Brothers
The Marx Brothers ended their Paramount run with Duck Soup, a box-office disappointment in 1933 that the American Film Institute now ranks among the 100 greatest American films.
Q 09Which Paramount film won Audrey Hepburn the Best Actress Oscar for playing a runaway princess?
Roman Holiday
Roman Holiday also won the story Oscar for Ian McLellan Hunter, who was fronting for blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo; the Academy reassigned the award to Trumbo in 1993, after his death.
Q 10Which adventure film opens with the Paramount logo dissolving into a real mountain peak?
Raiders of the Lost Ark
Raiders of the Lost Ark opens on a Hawaiian peak chosen to match the logo; as a boy Steven Spielberg had mimicked the Paramount mountain with real scenery in his home movies.
Q 11Which 1950 Paramount classic cast Gloria Swanson, once the studio's own silent queen, as a forgotten star?
Sunset Boulevard
Sunset Boulevard blurs fact and fiction: the old film Norma Desmond screens at home is Swanson's own Queen Kelly, whose director, Erich von Stroheim, plays her butler.
Q 12Which sales practice forced exhibitors to buy a year of Paramount films to get one star's pictures?
Block booking
Block booking made theatres take a studio's whole yearly programme to get its star pictures; the Supreme Court outlawed the practice in 1948.
Q 13Which Paramount spoof borrowed its plot and some dialogue from Zero Hour!, a serious 1957 drama the studio also released?
Airplane!
Q 21The 1948 Supreme Court ruling against Paramount and the other big studios barred them from doing what?
Own movie theater chains
Own movie theater chains was the banned practice: Paramount had to split off its cinemas as United Paramount Theatres, and the classic Hollywood studio system soon came to an end.
Q 22Which television network merged in 1953 with a company that had been split off from Paramount?
ABC
ABC was struggling until its new owner's cash funded a 1954 pact with Walt Disney: the company took about a third of his Disneyland park, and his weekly Disneyland series went to the network.
Q 23Which singing cowboy, also the first owner of baseball's Angels, bought Los Angeles station KTLA from Paramount in 1964?
Airplane! grew from an accident: its writers taped Zero Hour! overnight while collecting late-night commercials to spoof, then built their comedy on its plot.
Q 14On which Hollywood street is Paramount's headquarters, at number 5555?
Melrose Avenue
Melrose Avenue has housed the studio since the 1920s; when next-door neighbour RKO shut down, Paramount ended up absorbing its old lot as well.
Q 15Which animation studio made the Betty Boop and Popeye cartoons that Paramount released?
Fleischer Studios
Fleischer Studios grew out of Max Fleischer's invention of the rotoscope, a device that let animators trace their drawings over frames of live-action film.
Q 16Which 1983 Paramount hit follows a Pittsburgh steel-mill welder who dreams of becoming a ballerina?
Flashdance
Flashdance left Marine Jahan out of its credits, although she doubled for star Jennifer Beals in several of the film's famous dance sequences.
Q 17In which radio network did Paramount buy a half interest in the late 1920s?
CBS
Paramount bought half of CBS for stock in the network's early years but sold the holding back in 1932; decades later Viacom owned both Paramount and CBS.
Q 18Which duo starred in Paramount's Road comedies, which began with Road to Singapore in 1940?
Bob Hope and Bing Crosby
Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, usually joined by Dorothy Lamour, kept breaking off to joke with the audience; Road to Utopia even turns a snowy peak into the studio's mountain trademark.
Q 19Which rental-car magnate took charge of Paramount's finance committee in 1931 as the Depression bit?
John D. Hertz
John D. Hertz, founder of Yellow Cab and Hertz car rental, chaired the finance committee from 1931 but quit in January 1933 in a dispute over his duties; the studio was declared bankrupt that year.
Q 20Which Broadway star wrote and headlined Paramount's suggestive 1933 hit I'm No Angel?
Mae West
Mae West's hourglass figure was so famous that Allied servicemen in the Second World War nicknamed their inflatable life jackets Mae Wests.
Gene Autry
Gene Autry paid $12 million for KTLA, which Paramount had launched in 1947 as the first commercial TV station west of the Mississippi; he sold it in 1982 for $245 million.
Q 24Which 1956 Paramount epic was a remake of its director's own 1923 silent film?
The Ten Commandments
The Ten Commandments nearly killed its director: he suffered a heart attack on location in Egypt, yet went back to work and finished what proved to be his last film.
Q 25Which industrial conglomerate bought Paramount in 1966?
Gulf and Western
Gulf and Western had grown as a car-parts business until Charles Bluhdorn went on a buying spree that swept up zinc, sugar and cigar companies along with a Hollywood studio.
Q 26Which production chief restored Paramount's fortunes with Rosemary's Baby, Love Story and The Godfather?
Robert Evans
Robert Evans was a clothing salesman when, as the story goes, Norma Shearer spotted him beside a hotel pool and had him cast as her late husband, Irving Thalberg; he was still a novice producer when Paramount hired him in 1966.
Q 27Which sitcom star sold her own studio, on the lot next door to Paramount, to the studio's parent in 1967?
Lucille Ball
Lucille Ball had run Desilu alone since buying out Desi Arnaz in 1962; the sale handed Paramount two of her studio's newest series, Star Trek and Mission: Impossible.
Q 28Which film, the first that Marvel Studios financed itself, reached cinemas in 2008 through Paramount?
Iron Man
Iron Man opened a six-picture deal with Paramount; after Disney bought Marvel in 2009, it paid Paramount to give up the last two films, The Avengers and Iron Man 3.
Q 29Which executive, later founder of Fox Broadcasting, ran Paramount from 1974 to 1984?
Barry Diller
Barry Diller started in a talent agency's mailroom and made his name in network television, where he pioneered the made-for-television movie of the week, before Paramount hired him in 1974.
Q 30Which pair of late-1970s musicals gave Paramount back-to-back worldwide hits?
Saturday Night Fever and Grease
Saturday Night Fever and Grease both starred John Travolta; the first grew out of a magazine report on Brooklyn disco life that its author later admitted he had largely made up.