Movies Based on Toys and Games, Ranked Worst to Best
Greta Gerwig's new Barbie film may be getting all of the attention this month, but it's far from the first film to attempt to bring a children's toy line to the big screen. While some of those adaptations have been dismissed as nothing more than feature-length toy commercials, others have been successful in spite of their origins. In the gallery on this page, we rank over three dozen such films from worst to best according to their Metascores, which represent the consensus views of leading professional film critics.
All of the films are based on pre-existing toys—including tabletop games and trading cards—though we have omitted any films for franchises that were already well established as television shows (or comics) prior to becoming toys. In addition, we have also excluded any films with fewer than four reviews from critics (our minimum required for calculating a Metascore)—a group that mainly includes direct-to-video features (including, by the way, most of the previous Barbie movies).
A more unpleasant watch than even that unimaginably low Metascore suggests (trust us on this), this 1987 box office dud is based on Topps's Garbage Pail Kids trading cards, a collection of grotesque characters that aimed to satirize the then-popular Cabbage Patch Kids (and which had no narrative of their own to use as inspiration for the film). Then-The Facts of Life star Mackenzie Astin gamely attempts to inject some likeability into the proceedings, but there's little he can do with a tasteless script and when most of his opposite numbers are truly disgusting semi-animatronic mutants (played by little person performers in suffocating 80-pound suits) who sometimes appear to communicate only in farts. Fortunately, writer-director Rod Amateau—he, not Topps, was the driving force behind getting the film made—never directed another film, and Topps pulled the plug on the trading cards the next year.
No, you can't stream it. Why would you even ask that?
“A stunningly inept and totally reprehensible film.” —TV Guide