Sci-Fi Movie Trivia
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109 free Sci-Fi Movie trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
53 free Sci-Fi Movie trivia questions with answers. Science fiction is the genre where cinema shows off, so this quiz runs from Fritz Lang's Metropolis and the theremin-scored 1950s through 2001, Alien, Blade Runner and The Terminator, then on to The Matrix, WALL-E, District 9, Interstellar, Arrival, Blade Runner 2049 and both halves of Villeneuve's Dune. Japanese and European sci-fi get their due too: Godzilla, Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Solaris and The Fifth Element. The easy questions ask which candy replaced M&M's in E.T. and what the Nostromo is. The hard ones want the original name of HAL 9000, where the missing Metropolis reels turned up, how many cats played Jones in Alien, and which London church houses the organ that Hans Zimmer built Interstellar around. Written for movie nights and pub quizzes where at least one person owns a Blade Runner poster. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's article on each film, and each question carries the sentence that backs it up.
30 of 109 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Who directed Metropolis (1927), the silent epic now on UNESCO's Memory of the World register?
Fritz Lang
Fritz Lang's epic cost about five million Reichsmarks, over three times its budget, and was judged so unwieldy that distributors cut nearly a quarter of it.
Q 02A near-complete 16 mm print of Metropolis, restoring lost footage, was found in 2008 in which country?
Argentina
The print turned up in Argentina, at the Museo del Cine in Buenos Aires; the 16 mm reduction negative let restorers put back roughly 25 minutes of the original cut.
Q 03What is the giant robot accompanying Klaatu in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) called?
Gort
The robot is Gort; the phrase Helen Benson must say to it, 'Klaatu barada nikto', was famously quoted by Ash in Sam Raimi's Army of Darkness.
Q 04Bernard Herrmann's score for The Day the Earth Stood Still featured two of which electronic instrument?
Theremin
Theremin soloist Samuel Hoffman was a practising foot doctor who moonlighted on film scores; Herrmann paired a high and a low theremin with electric strings.
Q 05Which 1956 film set on Altair IV was the first major studio movie with an entirely electronic score?
Forbidden Planet
Forbidden Planet's score was built by Bebe and Louis Barron from circuits they made themselves; the musicians' union kept them from a composing credit, so it was billed as 'electronic tonalities'.
Q 06Before it became HAL 9000, the computer in 2001 was named after which Greek goddess?
Athena
Athena, after the goddess of wisdom, was the computer's name in Arthur C. Clarke's later drafts, which gave it a female personality before it became HAL.
Q 07In Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey, the spacecraft Discovery One is bound for which planet?
Jupiter
Jupiter is the film's destination; Arthur C. Clarke's novel sends Discovery One on to Saturn, but Kubrick's effects team couldn't make convincing rings, so the film stops a planet short.
Q 08Which Soviet director's 1972 film Solaris won the Grand Prix Spécial du Jury at Cannes?
Andrei Tarkovsky
Andrei Tarkovsky scorned Kubrick's 2001 as 'a lifeless schema with only pretensions to truth' and set out to give Solaris, from Stanisław Lem's novel, the human feeling he found missing.
Q 09In Alien (1979), what is the name of the commercial space tug?
Nostromo
Nostromo is the title of a 1904 Joseph Conrad novel, and the Conrad nods continue: the escape shuttle is the Narcissus, and the sequel's warship, the Sulaco, shares its name with the novel's port town.
Q 10Which artist designed the creature and alien environments for Alien (1979)?
H. R. Giger
H. R. Giger, from Chur in Switzerland, shared the visual-effects Oscar for his designs; the full-grown creature was played by Bolaji Badejo, a 6-foot-10 Nigerian design student spotted in a London pub.
Q 11In Alien (1979), the company's secret Special Order 937 describes the ship's crew with which word?
Expendable
Expendable: the order tells the science officer to bring the organism back, with all other considerations secondary; Ripley uncovers it when she questions the ship's computer, Mother.
Q 12Blade Runner (1982) is an adaptation of which 1968 Philip K. Dick novel?
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? supplied the plot but not the word 'replicants', which was coined for the film; Dick's novel calls its synthetic humans androids, or 'andys'.
Q 13In Blade Runner, which corporation bio-engineers the replicants?
Tyrell
Q 21In RoboCop (1987), which mega-corporation is granted control of the Detroit Police Department?
Omni Consumer Products
Omni Consumer Products (OCP) runs the privatized Detroit police; its executive Dick Jones unveils the ED-209 enforcement robot, which memorably malfunctions in a boardroom demonstration.
Q 22Which martial-arts star was originally cast as the creature in Predator (1987) before being replaced?
Jean-Claude Van Damme
Jean-Claude Van Damme was hired to make the creature an agile, ninja-like hunter but left early in the shoot; the redesigned Predator went to Kevin Peter Hall, who stood over seven feet tall.
Q 23At the end of Planet of the Apes (1968), which ruined landmark reveals that the planet is Earth?
Tyrell is also the name of the corporation's founder, Eldon Tyrell, who is killed by his own creation: Roy Batty comes to him demanding a longer life and, told it is impossible, crushes his skull.
Q 14Who rewrote the 'tears in rain' monologue in Blade Runner and presented the new words on set?
Rutger Hauer
Rutger Hauer, playing Roy Batty, cut the scripted speech down and added the closing 'tears in rain' line himself the night before shooting.
Q 15Which candy replaced M&M's in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial after Mars refused to let its own candy appear?
Reese's Pieces
Reese's Pieces got the spot after Mars declined; Hershey said yes, and the candy's sales soared after the film opened in 1982, one of the most famous product placements ever.
Q 16In 1983, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial became the highest-grossing film of all time by passing which movie?
Star Wars
Star Wars had taken the record from Spielberg's own Jaws, so E.T. won it back for him; a decade later he broke his record again with Jurassic Park.
Q 17In which Italian city was James Cameron ill when a fever dream gave him the idea for The Terminator?
Rome
Rome is where Cameron lay ill around the release of Piranha II; he dreamed of a metal figure dragging itself out of a fire clutching kitchen knives, and that image grew into The Terminator.
Q 18Which Guns N' Roses single was tied in to Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)?
You Could Be Mine
'You Could Be Mine' came with a video in which Schwarzenegger's T-800 scans each member of the band and decides that killing them would be a 'waste of ammo'.
Q 19Which actor was first cast as Marty McFly in Back to the Future, then fired weeks into filming?
Eric Stoltz
Eric Stoltz was let go weeks into the shoot because the humour wasn't coming through; Michael J. Fox replaced him, filming through the night after days on his sitcom Family Ties.
Q 20Which director made RoboCop, Total Recall and Starship Troopers?
Paul Verhoeven
Paul Verhoeven rejected the RoboCop script after a glance at its first page; his wife Martine read it and persuaded him there was more to the story than he had seen.
Statue of Liberty
Statue of Liberty: its ruins show astronaut Taylor he has been on Earth all along, a twist that isn't in Pierre Boulle's novel; it appears in early drafts by Rod Serling of The Twilight Zone, though credit for the idea is disputed.
Q 24In Total Recall (1990), which role does Quaid choose for his implanted Mars memory?
Secret agent
Secret agent is the 'Ego Trip' Quaid orders at Rekall, but he starts raving about his blown cover before it is even implanted, so the staff blank his memory of the visit and dump him in a cab.
Q 25Jurassic Park held the record as highest-grossing film of all time until which movie overtook it?
Titanic
Titanic (1997) took the record; Jurassic Park itself had been finished at long distance, with Spielberg overseeing its post-production from Poland in the evenings while he shot Schindler's List.
Q 26Which 1962 French short, told almost entirely in still photographs, inspired Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys?
La Jetée
La Jetée tells its time-travel story in still photographs, except for a few seconds in which the woman opens her eyes and blinks; Gilliam's film credits Chris Marker's short as its basis.
Q 27The title of Gattaca (1997) is spelled from the letters that stand for what?
The four DNA nucleobases
The four DNA nucleobases, guanine, adenine, thymine and cytosine, supply the letters; the film was shot as The Eighth Day and renamed because a Belgian film had already taken that title.
Q 28Which fashion designer created the costumes for Luc Besson's The Fifth Element (1997)?
Jean Paul Gaultier
Jean Paul Gaultier designed each of the 900 costumes worn by the extras in the Fhloston Paradise scenes, and checked every one of them on set each morning.
Q 29Men in Black (1997) won its only Academy Award in which category?
Best Makeup
Best Makeup went to Rick Baker and David LeRoy Anderson for the aliens; despite all its digital creatures, the film wasn't even nominated for Best Visual Effects.
Q 30In Contact (1997), the signal of prime numbers that Ellie Arroway detects comes from which star?
Vega
Vega is about 25 light-years away, so the first thing Ellie's team decodes is Earth's own early television bounced back: Hitler opening the 1936 Berlin Olympics.