50 free 2023 Pop Culture trivia questions with answers — pop culture quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
2023 was the year of Barbenheimer, the Eras Tour, a purple milkshake and a monster-shaped hole in TikTok, and this quiz covers all of it. There are questions on the films (Barbie's billion, Oppenheimer's Oscars, the Super Mario movie, a bear on drugs), the music (Miley's comeback single, Beyoncé's Renaissance tour, a pregnant halftime headliner, an unknown Virginia singer debuting at number one), the TV (the Roy family's farewell, HBO's fungal apocalypse, The Golden Bachelor, Jury Duty, a Netflix road-rage feud) and the news that became memes: the Chinese spy balloon, the Titan submersible, Meta's Twitter rival, Twitter's rebrand, Prince Harry's Spare and the coronation. It works as a year-in-review round for a pub quiz or a New Year's party, or as a test of how much you actually remember of the year that started with the Roman Empire meme and ended with the GTA VI trailer. Easy questions ask who voiced Mario and which club signed Messi; the hard end wants the name of the ghostwriter, the Titan's mother ship and the city where the Renaissance tour opened. Every answer has been checked against the Wikipedia articles on the events, films, shows and songs, and each question shows its source once you have answered.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01On what date did Barbie and Oppenheimer open on the same day, creating the "Barbenheimer" phenomenon?
July 21, 2023
Their joint opening weekend was the fourth-largest ever at the US box office, and between them they won eight Oscars.
Q 02Who directed Barbie, co-writing it with her husband Noah Baumbach?
Greta Gerwig
It grossed $1.448 billion and became Warner Bros.' highest-grossing film ever.
Q 03Which Barbie song won the Academy Award for Best Original Song?
"What Was I Made For?"
Billie Eilish and Finneas wrote it; Ryan Gosling's "I'm Just Ken" was nominated in the same category and lost.
Q 04Which actor played J. Robert Oppenheimer and won the Best Actor Oscar for it?
Cillian Murphy
Murphy was the first cast member Christopher Nolan signed, and the film won seven Oscars including Best Picture.
Q 05Why was Oppenheimer the first Christopher Nolan film since Memento not released by Warner Bros.?
He fell out with the studio over its simultaneous HBO Max releases
Universal gave him a $100 million budget, an equal marketing spend and 20 percent of first-dollar gross.
Q 06In which US city did the Eras Tour open on March 17, 2023?
Glendale, Arizona
The tour ran to 149 shows and became the first ever to gross more than $1 billion and then $2 billion.
Q 07Which fast-food mascot's 52nd birthday was marked by a purple milkshake that spawned a horror TikTok trend?
Grimace
Users filmed themselves sipping the shake and then lying in staged crime scenes; McDonald's sold it from June 12 to July 9.
Q 08Who voiced Mario in The Super Mario Bros. Movie, the first video-game film to gross a billion dollars?
Chris Pratt
Jack Black's Bowser sang "Peaches", and the film ended 2023 as the second-highest-grossing release of the year.
Q 09Which Meta app gained 100 million users in five days in July 2023?
Threads
It beat ChatGPT's record and was built to take on Twitter after Elon Musk's takeover; you need an Instagram account to use it.
Q 10Twitter was rebranded to what on July 23, 2023?
X
The bird logo went the next day, though the domain did not switch from twitter.com to x.com until May 2024.
Q 11Who replaced Elon Musk as CEO of Twitter in June 2023?
Linda Yaccarino
The former NBCUniversal advertising chief lasted until July 2025.
Q 12Which company operated the Titan submersible that imploded on June 18, 2023 on a dive to the Titanic?
OceanGate
All five aboard died, including OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush; the debris was found about 500 metres from the Titanic's bow.
Q 13What was the name of the Titan's mother ship, which lost contact 1 hour 33 minutes into the dive?
MV Polar Prince
Authorities were only alerted when the sub failed to resurface later that day, and the search went on for four days.
Q 21Which Friends star died on October 28, 2023, at the age of 54?
Matthew Perry
His 2022 memoir Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing had laid out his decades-long struggle with addiction.
Q 22In which city did Beyoncé open her Renaissance World Tour on May 10, 2023?
Stockholm
It closed in Kansas City in October as the highest-grossing tour ever by a Black woman.
Q 23Which podcast does Travis Kelce co-host with his brother Jason?
New Heights
Kelce also hosted an episode of Saturday Night Live in 2023, months before his relationship with the year's biggest pop star went public.
Q 14On what date were Charles III and Camilla crowned at Westminster Abbey?
6 May 2023
It was the first British coronation of the 21st century and the 40th at the Abbey since William the Conqueror in 1066.
Q 15Which Miley Cyrus single, released January 13, 2023, became the best-selling global single of the year?
"Flowers"
It racked up 2.7 billion subscription-stream equivalents according to the IFPI, her biggest hit ever.
Q 16At the 2023 Grammys, Beyoncé passed which conductor as the most-awarded artist ever?
Georg Solti
Her 32nd win came in Best Dance/Electronic Album; Harry Styles took Album of the Year for Harry's House.
Q 17Which film won seven Oscars in March 2023, the first sci-fi film to take Best Picture?
Everything Everywhere All at Once
It also became only the third film, after A Streetcar Named Desire and Network, to win three acting awards.
Q 18Who was the 72-year-old lead of the first season of The Golden Bachelor?
Gerry Turner
ABC announced him in July 2023, and the writers' strike pushed the show to Thursday nights.
Q 19The 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike ran from July 14 to which date?
November 9
The writers' strike had ended on September 27; between them the two walkouts were the biggest disruption to Hollywood since the pandemic.
Q 20Which HBO series based on a video game premiered on January 15, 2023 with Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey?
The Last of Us
Its premiere drew almost 40 million viewers within two months, making it HBO's most-watched debut season.
Q 24Which singer headlined the Super Bowl LVII halftime show in 2023, her first live performance in five years?
Rihanna
It was the first halftime show sponsored by Apple Music after a decade of Pepsi, and she revealed her second pregnancy on stage.
Q 25Which unknown singer debuted at number one on the Hot 100 in August 2023 with "Rich Men North of Richmond"?
Oliver Anthony
He was the first artist ever to debut atop the chart with no prior chart history, and the song was the first question at that month's Republican debate.
Q 26Off which state's coast was the Chinese surveillance balloon shot down on February 4, 2023?
South Carolina
It came down near Myrtle Beach after crossing the continent, and three more unidentified objects were shot down within days.
Q 27Who ghostwrote Prince Harry's memoir Spare, the fastest-selling non-fiction book ever on its release day?
J. R. Moehringer
The title comes from the adage that an heir and a spare are needed to secure a family's inheritance.
Q 28Who was Time magazine's Person of the Year for 2023?
Taylor Swift
She was the first entertainer chosen for her work as an artist, in the year of the Eras Tour and its concert film.
Q 29Which band opened the Las Vegas Sphere with a residency on September 29, 2023?
U2
U2:UV Achtung Baby Live ran 40 shows inside the world's largest LED screen; the venue cost more than $2 billion.
Q 30Which 2023 Larian Studios RPG first won Game of the Year at all five major awards shows?
Baldur's Gate 3
Larian moved its PC release up four weeks to avoid clashing with Bethesda's Starfield.