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70 free Hard Movie trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
These 61 hard movie trivia questions are for people who find ordinary film quizzes too easy. There is nothing here about who played Jack in Titanic. Instead you get the only X-rated Best Picture winner, the film that went 0 for 11 at the Oscars, the silent-era director who plays the butler in Sunset Boulevard, the man who coined the word MacGuffin, and where a print of Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc turned up in 1981. The set runs from the first Academy Awards ceremony to recent record-breakers and mixes Hollywood with world cinema: Kurosawa and Leone, Eisenstein and Bergman, Nosferatu and Metropolis, plus the production stories behind Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Back to the Future and Apocalypse Now. Every question sits in the hard-to-expert range, and the wrong answers are chosen to be believable, so a coin flip will not save you. Use it as the last round of a movie night, a tie-breaker for a pub quiz, or a solo test of how much film history you really know. Every answer was checked against an encyclopaedic source and each question shows the sentence that backs it up once you have answered.
30 of 70 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which is the only X-rated film ever to win the Academy Award for Best Picture?
Midnight Cowboy
The 1969 drama's rating was later changed to R; no other X-rated film has won any Oscar at all.
Q 02What was the first sequel to win the Academy Award for Best Picture?
The Godfather Part II
Robert De Niro won Best Supporting Actor for playing the young Vito Corleone, a role Marlon Brando had already won Best Actor for two years earlier.
Q 03Which 1977 ballet drama shares the record for the most Oscar nominations (11) without a single win?
The Turning Point
It shares the unhappy record with The Color Purple, which went 0 for 11 in 1986.
Q 04Which film holds the record for the biggest Oscar clean sweep, winning all 11 categories it was nominated in?
Return of the King
Its 11-for-11 night in 2004 beat the nine-for-nine sweeps of Gigi and The Last Emperor.
Q 05Citizen Kane was expected to dominate the 1942 Oscars. What was the only award it actually won?
Best Original Screenplay
Orson Welles shared the writing prize with Herman J. Mankiewicz; the film lost Best Picture to How Green Was My Valley.
Q 06Which graphic designer storyboarded the shower scene in Psycho and created its title sequence?
Saul Bass
Bass also designed the titles for Anatomy of a Murder and North by Northwest, and Bernard Herrmann's shrieking strings finished the job.
Q 07The mechanical sharks in Jaws were nicknamed 'Bruce' after whom?
Spielberg's lawyer
Bruce Ramer was Steven Spielberg's attorney; the props broke down so often that the shark is barely seen for most of the film.
Q 08Who provided the voice of the computer HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey?
Douglas Rain
Rain, a Canadian stage actor, was cast after Kubrick heard him narrate the National Film Board documentary Universe.
Q 09Which silent-era director plays Max, the devoted butler, in Sunset Boulevard?
Erich von Stroheim
Von Stroheim had actually directed Gloria Swanson in the unfinished Queen Kelly, a clip of which appears in the film.
Q 10In which year did the original Star Wars first carry the subtitle 'Episode IV – A New Hope' in theaters?
1981
The film was simply called Star Wars on release; the episode number arrived with a reissue after The Empire Strikes Back had made the numbering scheme public.
Q 11Who directed The Empire Strikes Back?
Irvin Kershner
Lucas handed over the director's chair to avoid the stress of the first film and to concentrate on building Industrial Light & Magic.
Q 12Why was Raiders' whip-versus-sword fight cut to Indiana Jones simply shooting the swordsman?
Harrison Ford had dysentery
Stuntman Terry Richards had rehearsed for weeks; Ford's illness on the Tunisian shoot turned the scene into one of the film's biggest laughs.
Q 13Which actor shot several weeks of Back to the Future as Marty McFly before being replaced?
Eric Stoltz
Q 21Who is the youngest winner of the Academy Award for Best Actress?
Marlee Matlin
She was 21 when she won for Children of a Lesser God, her screen debut, and was also the first deaf performer to win an Oscar.
Q 22Who is the youngest person ever to win a competitive Academy Award?
Tatum O'Neal
She was ten when she won Best Supporting Actress for Paper Moon, acting opposite her dad, Ryan O'Neal.
Q 23Who was the first performer to win an acting Oscar posthumously?
Peter Finch
He died two months before the 1977 ceremony; his widow accepted the Best Actor award for Network.
Recasting Michael J. Fox meant reshooting the completed scenes and added about $4 million to the budget.
Q 14Which real hotel provided the exterior establishing shots of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining?
Timberline Lodge, Oregon
The interiors were built at Elstree Studios in England, and the real lodge has no hedge maze.
Q 15Which Apocalypse Now cast member suffered a near-fatal heart attack during the Philippines shoot?
Martin Sheen
Sheen was 36; the production also lost sets to a typhoon and ran more than a year over schedule.
Q 16Which was the first horror film to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture?
The Exorcist
The 1973 film received ten nominations in all and won two, for Adapted Screenplay and Sound.
Q 17Which 1934 film was the first to win the Oscar 'Big Five'?
It Happened One Night
The Big Five are Picture, Director, Actor, Actress and Screenplay; One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) is the only other film to take all five.
Q 18How long did Sylvester Stallone reportedly take to write the screenplay for Rocky?
Three days
He then refused to sell it unless he could star, and the film went on to win Best Picture for 1976.
Q 19Which was the first film to gross more than $1 billion worldwide?
Titanic
It crossed the mark in March 1998 and later became the second film to pass $2 billion, during a 3D re-release timed for the ship's centenary.
Q 20Which musical holds the record for the most Academy Awards won by a film that did not win Best Picture?
Cabaret
It took eight Oscars in 1973, including Director for Bob Fosse and Actress for Liza Minnelli, but lost the top prize to Coppola's mafia epic.
Q 24With whom did Katharine Hepburn share the Best Actress Oscar in the only tie in that category's history?
Barbra Streisand
Hepburn won for The Lion in Winter and Streisand for Funny Girl at the 1969 ceremony.
Q 25Who holds the record for the most Academy Awards won by an individual, with 22?
Walt Disney
Disney also holds the record for nominations, with 59, most of them for animated and documentary shorts.
Q 26Who was the first actor to decline an Academy Award, refusing his Best Actor Oscar for Patton?
George C. Scott
He had warned the Academy months in advance, arguing that performances cannot be compared with one another.
Q 27Which is the only Alfred Hitchcock film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture?
Rebecca
The 1940 film won just two Oscars, Picture and Cinematography, and Hitchcock himself lost Best Director.
Q 28Which film topped the 2012 Sight & Sound critics' poll of the greatest films ever made?
Vertigo
It received mixed reviews on release in 1958 and finished second when the poll was run again in 2022.
Q 29The Wilhelm scream stock sound effect was first recorded for which 1951 film?
Distant Drums
The scream was allegedly voiced by singer-actor Sheb Wooley and named after a character shot by an arrow in a 1953 western.
Q 30Who coined the term 'MacGuffin', which Alfred Hitchcock later made famous?
Angus MacPhail
Hitchcock popularised the device with The 39 Steps in 1935, in which the MacGuffin is a set of incidental military secrets.