In the movies “Legends of the Fall” (1994) and “Allied” (2016), Brad Pitt’s characters fight in World War I and World War II, respectively, for which country? Hint — it’s the same country, and not the United States.

A funny thing happened when trivia maestro Ian Berry closed the first-ever Films With Benefits event with this question in January 2023. For starters, no one got it right.

“It was for all the marbles,” he remembered of the inaugural Pitt-themed event. “Everyone was just looking around, going, ‘Oh my god, I have no idea.’”

Funnily enough, though, that’s when Berry says he knew his monthly format — now Astoria’s go-to trivia night for movie fans — might succeed. He watched the wheels churn behind the crowd’s eyes at Fortune & Glory Cider Co., and it didn’t matter that everyone was stumped.

The question was crafted so that every team could write down a reasonable guess, let out an “ohhhhhh” when the answer was revealed — it’s Canada!? — and then come back for more the next month.

And return people did. Now a presentation of Galactix Arcade & Taphouse, Films With Benefits is expanding to two nights due to demand.

The next evening’s theme is “Cage Match” — roughly two hours of questions about Nicolas Cage’s mold-shattering acting career. Night one, on Thursday, sold out weeks ago — hence the expansion — but approximately 20 tickets for night two on Dec. 19 remain.

“I think everyone knows who Nic Cage is and, to a certain degree, has fun with his movies and his celebrity,” Berry said. “When we’re picking a new subject for trivia, (we want) things that people think they know a lot about. What we try to exploit is that you don’t know very much about this thing at all. And that’s actually where people have a lot of fun.”

Previous events have featured themes ranging from post-apocalyptic films to movies starring musicians, to “Die Hard” bingo.

That programming specificity is crucial, said Jeremy Towsey-French, co-owner of both Galactix and the now-shuttered Fortune & Glory.

Towsey-French not only recruited Berry, a longtime Portland movie projectionist, to move to Astoria and work at his cidery in 2022 but also to mine Berry’s lifelong cinephilia to create Films With Benefits.

From the jump, they wanted to set Films With Benefits apart from standard bar trivia with tight theming and ambitious audiovisuals — many of Berry’s questions rely on carefully edited clips.

“Just based on feedback from the audiences, the theme really matters,” said Towsey-French, who credits his wife, Keri, also a part-owner of Fortune & Glory, with the original idea for a movie trivia night and asking Berry to host.

“And it’s about the actual content, right?” he added. “It can’t be just easy pre-formatted questions pulled off the internet.”

Next up

Next up

“Cage Match: The Wonder, Mastery and Mystery of America’s National Treasure: Nick Cage,” sold out Thursday and returning at 7 p.m. Dec. 19.

Galactix Arcade & Taphouse, 254 Ninth St., Astoria. Doors open at 6 p.m. Tickets are $2 at www.thegalactix.com/events.

Berry would never. In fact, during the first year of Films With Benefits, the host spent so many hours each month pre-screening films to craft questions based on their most compelling scenes that he “burned out,” and Films With Benefits took a half-year hiatus. In the interim, Fortune & Glory closed, and the trivia nights resumed at Galactix in June 2024.

In 2024, Films With Benefits has shifted its format from month to month, twice sprinkling in a “Short Round” event where all the night’s questions pertain to just one movie. In those cases, Berry will edit the movie in question into condensed — but still narratively cohesive — chunks and screen them between trivia rounds.

For all the inherent movie geekery, Films With Benefits questions are not meant only for hardcore cinephiles. Teams routinely get more than half the answers correct, and Berry modulates the difficulty level within each round.

If Berry does venture into obscurity with a question, it’s never, “What did Nicolas Cage have for lunch on the 18th shooting day of Leaving Las Vegas?” Rather, an out-there question is usually an excuse to clue participants into a movie they don’t know — “Welcome To The Dollhouse” (1995) being Berry’s go-to example — showing the full house a clip that lodges that film in their memory banks.

“Jeremy and I both have a dream of fostering a community of film lovers in this town,” Berry said. “Showing people clips … it’s not education in the academic sense, but it’s education in the sense that showing people things might turn them on to more movies.”

Even though the trivia nights have many regulars, rest assured that this month, Berry will remind the audience of Films With Benefits’ three guiding principles like it’s the very first time.

Have a blast. No phones, and under no circumstances should anyone shout the answers.