2023 Pop Culture Trivia
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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 01Who played Ken opposite Margot Robbie in Barbie, which opened on the same day as Oppenheimer in July 2023?
Ryan Gosling
Ryan Gosling played Ken; fans made a double bill of the two same-day releases, nicknamed Barbenheimer, and US cinemas took $311 million that weekend.
Q 02Who directed Barbie, the highest-grossing film of 2023?
Greta Gerwig
Greta Gerwig was brought in by star and producer Margot Robbie to write Barbie, and agreed on condition that her partner Noah Baumbach write it with her; she then put herself forward to direct it.
Q 03Which Barbie song won the Academy Award for Best Original Song?
"What Was I Made For?"
"What Was I Made For?" pulled Billie Eilish out of a spell of writer's block; she wrote it about Barbie with her brother Finneas and only afterwards saw that she had been writing about herself.
Q 04Which actor played J. Robert Oppenheimer and won the Best Actor Oscar for it?
Cillian Murphy
Cillian Murphy had taken supporting roles in five earlier Christopher Nolan films, from Batman Begins to Dunkirk, before the director handed him this first lead.
Q 05After Christopher Nolan fell out with Warner Bros. over its HBO Max releases, which studio released Oppenheimer?
Universal Pictures
Universal Pictures won Nolan over by meeting his terms: a $100 million budget, a long exclusive run in cinemas, and no other film of its own released for three weeks either side.
Q 06In which US city did the Eras Tour open on March 17, 2023?
Glendale, Arizona
Glendale, Arizona, hosted opening night at State Farm Stadium; demand for the tour had crashed Ticketmaster's presale four months earlier, and a US Senate hearing on the company followed.
Q 07Which McDonald's mascot's birthday milkshake set off a mock-horror TikTok trend in June 2023?
Grimace
Grimace, the purple McDonald's character introduced in 1971, got a birthday meal with a berry-flavored shake from June 12, 2023; TikTokers filmed themselves collapsing after sipping it.
Q 08Who voiced Mario in the hit 2023 animated film based on Super Mario Bros.?
Chris Pratt
Chris Pratt took the role over from Charles Martinet, Mario's voice in the games since the 1990s, who instead got a cameo as the brothers' father.
Q 09Which Meta app gained 100 million users in five days in July 2023?
Threads
Threads, Meta's rival to Twitter, passed 100 million sign-ups in five days; a week on, tracking firms found daily users down about 20% and time spent per user cut in half.
Q 10Twitter's 2023 rebrand to X revived the name of Elon Musk's 1999 online bank, which grew into which company?
PayPal
PayPal took that name in 2001, a year after X.com merged with its rival Confinity; Musk bought the x.com address back in 2017, saying it had sentimental value.
Q 11Who replaced Elon Musk as CEO of Twitter in June 2023?
Linda Yaccarino
Linda Yaccarino, a television advertising chief, took over in June 2023, six months after Musk polled users on whether he should step down and 57.5% said yes; she resigned in July 2025.
Q 12Which company operated the Titan submersible that imploded on June 18, 2023 on a dive to the Titanic?
OceanGate
OceanGate's chief executive Stockton Rush died aboard with his four passengers; in 2018 submersible experts had drafted a letter warning him that the firm's experimental approach risked catastrophe.
Q 13The Titan submersible lost on a 2023 dive to the Titanic was steered with a modified version of what?
A video game controller
Q 21Which Friends star died on October 28, 2023, at the age of 54?
Matthew Perry
Matthew Perry, Friends' Chandler Bing, had detailed his addictions in a 2022 memoir; five people, two doctors among them, were later charged with supplying the ketamine that killed him.
Q 22In which city did Beyoncé open her Renaissance World Tour on May 10, 2023?
Stockholm
Stockholm hosted the opening nights, and visiting fans pushed hotel prices so high that a Danske Bank economist blamed a "Beyoncé blip" for Sweden's higher-than-expected inflation that month.
Q 23Which podcast does Travis Kelce co-host with his brother Jason?
New Heights
A video game controller: the chief executive of the sub's builder showed a CBS reporter the modified Logitech gamepad in 2022 and boasted that it ran the whole vessel.
Q 14In which church were Charles III and Camilla crowned in May 2023?
Westminster Abbey
Westminster Abbey has staged England's coronations since 1066; for this one the Stone of Destiny was brought from Edinburgh Castle to sit beneath the 700-year-old Coronation Chair.
Q 15Which Miley Cyrus single, released in January 2023, became the best-selling global single of the year?
"Flowers"
"Flowers" spent eight weeks at number one in the US; its echoes of Bruno Mars's "When I Was Your Man" led an owner of rights in that song to sue for copyright infringement in 2024.
Q 16In 2023 Beyoncé became the most-awarded Grammy artist ever but lost Album of the Year to whom?
Harry Styles
Harry Styles won for Harry's House on the night Beyoncé's 32nd Grammy took her past conductor Georg Solti's record; she finally won the top album prize in 2025 for Cowboy Carter.
Q 17Which film won seven Oscars, including Best Picture, at the March 2023 ceremony?
Everything Everywhere All at Once
Everything Everywhere All at Once took three of the four acting Oscars; one went to Ke Huy Quan, the former child star who had quit acting for nearly two decades after roles dried up.
Q 18Who was the 72-year-old lead of the first season of The Golden Bachelor?
Gerry Turner
Gerry Turner proposed to Theresa Nist in the finale and married her on live television in January 2024; three months later the couple said they were divorcing.
Q 19Which sitcom star was president of the actors' union SAG-AFTRA during its 2023 strike?
Fran Drescher
Fran Drescher, star of The Nanny, called the studios "a very greedy entity" on the eve of the July 14 walkout; it lasted until November 9, when a deal brought new AI protections.
Q 20Which HBO series based on a video game premiered on January 15, 2023 with Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey?
The Last of Us
The Last of Us adapts Naughty Dog's 2013 game, whose infected were inspired by a Planet Earth clip of a real fungus that takes control of an ant's body.
New Heights is named for Cleveland Heights, Ohio, where the brothers went to school; its audience jumped when they met in Super Bowl LVII, the first brothers to face each other in the game.
Q 24Which singer headlined the Super Bowl LVII halftime show in 2023, her first live performance in five years?
Rihanna
Rihanna headlined Super Bowl LVII on February 12, 2023, her first live show since the 2018 Grammys, and 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
Oliver Anthony was the first artist to debut at number one with no chart history; when the song opened a Republican debate, he said he had written it about just those people.
Q 26Off which state's coast was the Chinese surveillance balloon shot down on February 4, 2023?
South Carolina
An F-22 shot it down off South Carolina near Myrtle Beach after it had crossed the continent; three more unidentified objects were downed within days.
Q 27In his 2023 memoir Spare, Prince Harry says which relative knocked him to the floor during a 2019 row?
Prince William
Prince William, Harry writes, grabbed him by the collar and knocked him down onto a dog bowl in a row about Meghan; the memoir sold 1.43 million copies on its first day.
Q 28Who was Time magazine's Person of the Year for 2023?
Taylor Swift
Taylor Swift was the first person chosen for achievement in the arts; that July, fans dancing at her Seattle concerts had shaken the ground like a magnitude 2.3 earthquake.
Q 29Which band opened the Las Vegas Sphere with a residency on September 29, 2023?
U2
U2 played 40 shows there without drummer Larry Mullen Jr., who was recovering from surgery; Bram van den Berg of the Dutch band Krezip sat in for him.
Q 30Which 2023 game was the first to win Game of the Year at all five major awards shows?
Baldur's Gate 3
Baldur's Gate 3 swept the top prize at The Game Awards, the Golden Joysticks, DICE, GDC and BAFTA; Larian had moved its PC launch up four weeks to escape an autumn crowded by Starfield.