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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
He also co-produced it with Jon Landau, his producing partner from Titanic.
Q 02Who plays Jake Sully?
Sam Worthington
He was relatively unknown at the time and got the part after an angry outburst during secretive auditions impressed the director.
Q 03Which actress plays Neytiri?
Zoe Saldaña
Cast early, she helped screen-test the actors auditioning for Jake, including her eventual co-star.
Q 04What valuable mineral are the humans mining on Pandora?
Unobtanium
The name is an old engineering in-joke for any material that would be perfect if only it existed.
Q 05Pandora is a moon in which star system?
Alpha Centauri
It is the nearest star system to the Sun, which makes the 22nd-century mining trip at least plausible.
Q 06In what year is the film set?
2154
By then Earth suffers from resource exhaustion and ecological collapse, which is why the RDA is digging on another world.
Q 07Who plays Colonel Miles Quaritch?
Stephen Lang
He had auditioned unsuccessfully for Aliens more than two decades earlier; Josh Brolin was approached first but declined the long shoot.
Q 08Which character does Sigourney Weaver play?
Grace Augustine
She is an exobiologist and head of the Avatar Program; a plant physiology professor advised on how such a scientist might study alien flora.
Q 09Jake is initiated into which Na'vi clan?
Omaticaya
Their home sits on top of a rich unobtanium deposit, which is the whole problem.
Q 10Who is the clan's spiritual leader and Neytiri's mother?
Mo'at
She orders her daughter to teach Jake their ways, and later frees Jake and Grace after the clan takes them captive.
Q 11Wes Studi plays which clan chief, Neytiri's father?
Eytukan
He is killed when the RDA destroys the clan's home, and Tsu'tey becomes chief.
Q 12Jake regains the clan's trust by bonding with which feared flying creature?
Toruk
The creature later gave its name to the Cirque du Soleil stage show set in Pandora's past.
Q 13What is the name of the Na'vi mother goddess?
Eywa
Jake prays to her through the Tree of Souls before the battle, and Neytiri reads the animals joining the fight as her answer.
Q 14What is the giant tree where the clan lives called?
Q 21Who sang the theme song "I See You"?
Leona Lewis
Its music video, directed by Jake Nava, premiered on MySpace three days before the US release.
Q 22Which USC linguist created the Na'vi language?
Paul Frommer
The director himself contributed about 30 of its roughly 1,000 words.
Q 23The Na'vi language's ejective consonants resemble those of which real language?
Amharic
Amharic is the working language of Ethiopia; ejectives are made with a burst of air from the closed glottis.
Which New Zealand studio was the film's lead visual-effects company?
Hometree
The director said its fiery destruction was meant to echo the September 11 attacks.
Q 15What was the film's official production budget?
$237 million
Some estimates put the real cost at $280-310 million, plus around $150 million for promotion.
Q 16In which city did the film have its world premiere on December 10, 2009?
London
The venue was the Odeon Leicester Square; the US release followed on December 18.
Q 17How many Academy Award nominations did the film receive?
Nine
They included Best Picture and Best Director; it lost both to The Hurt Locker, directed by the director's ex-wife Kathryn Bigelow.
Q 18Which of these Oscars did the film win?
Best Cinematography
Its three wins were all craft awards: Art Direction, Cinematography and Visual Effects.
Q 19How many Saturn Awards did the film win at the 36th ceremony?
Ten
It won every category it was nominated in, including Best Science Fiction Film, Director, Writing and Special Effects.
Q 20Who composed the film's score?
James Horner
It was his third collaboration with the director after Aliens and Titanic, and he called it the hardest score he had ever worked on.
Weta Digital
ILM was brought in alongside it for the battle sequences and devised a new way to make CGI explosions.
Q 25At its peak, how many people did the lead effects studio have working on the film?
900
They rendered it on a 10,000-square-foot server farm of 4,000 Hewlett-Packard machines.
Q 26What was the custom cloud and asset-management system Microsoft built for the film called?
Gaia
It kept massive amounts of data in sync for crew members working remotely.
Q 27Which texturing and paint software was developed by The Foundry for the film?
Mari
It became a standard 3D painting tool across the industry after the film.
Q 28How much storage does each minute of the finished film occupy?
17.28 gigabytes
Building the Na'vi and Pandora took more than a petabyte, and single frames often took hours to render.
Q 29With whom did the director develop the Fusion 3D camera system used on the film?
Vince Pace
The rig put two high-definition cameras in a single body to create depth perception.
Q 30Which actor's Bourne Ultimatum schedule kept him from playing Jake?
Matt Damon
Chris Evans, Chris Pine, Chris Pratt and Channing Tatum were also considered for the role.