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).
The fourth installment in the Transformers live-action film series, Michael Bay's 2014 film is a bit of a series reboot, featuring a mostly new cast of humans (led by Mark Wahlberg and Stanley Tucci) and CGI robots. Despite being one of the worst-reviewed entries in the film series, Age of Extinction grossed over $1 billion worldwide en route to becoming the highest-grossing film of 2014, beating out Guardians of the Galaxy and the concluding film in the Hobbit trilogy.
“Age of Extinction is just another warmed-over, cynical, ATM machine of a movie. It’s soulless eye candy.” —Richard Roeper, Chicago Sun-Times