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).
First launched in 1954, Hasbro's G.I. Joe toy soldier line was adapted into comics, animated television shows, videogames, and animated films* before finally making the jump into live-action features with 2009's The Rise of Cobra. Directed by The Mummy's Stephen Sommers, Cobra is a sci-fi action film set in a near future in which the elite "G.I. Joe Team" special ops unit must prevent an attack using nanotech weapons. Some big names in the cast (including Channing Tatum, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Dennis Quaid) helped propel Cobra to just over $300 million in worldwide grosses, which wasn't quite enough to make it all that profitable but did convince Paramount to greenlight a sequel (G.I. Joe: Retaliation). Critics were more "No Joe!" than "Yo Joe!", however: Many found it mind-numbingly dumb—and compared it to the aforementioned Transformers film adaptations, which critics also disliked—though a few reviewers succumbed to its goofy action fun.
* Only one G.I. Joe animated film, 1987's G.I. Joe: The Movie, was released theatrically, but a lack of reviews prevented us from including it in this gallery.
“Bond without the style and Team America without the bellylaughs. The moronic script and nonsensical plot are good for a snicker, though.” —Dan Jolin, Empire
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