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).
By the power of Grayskull, we give you ... another Golan-Globus disaster. Yes, the same producers that provided the 1980s with its worst (though also best) arm-wrestling drama, its worst Superman movie, and most inexplicable rock musical (among dozens of infamous duds) were the first to bring Mattel's He-Man toy line to any screen in live-action form. In fact, it's one of the very first live-action toy adaptations of any kind.
Released in 1987 a few years after a popular MOTU animated TV series (and that less-popular animated film we previously mentioned) and five years after the launch of the action figures, Masters of the Universe starred Dolph Lundgren as He-Man, Frank Langella (!) as the evil Skeletor, and newcomer Courteney Cox as—no, not She-Ra, but Julie Winston. (Who can forget buying their first Julie Winston action figure.) Terrible reviews certainly didn't help, and Masters of the Universe was a money-loser at the box office, putting a quick end to the toy franchise's days on the big screen (though the 1989 Jean-Claude van Damme movie Cyborg does reuse sets created for a once-planned Masters of the Universe sequel). A planned Netflix film reboot was recently canceled.
“I'm not going to lie to you here, this movie is a steaming pile of you-know-what. The acting is horrendous, the story is the most cookie-cutter clone of every movie after Star Wars as you can get, and the effects are downright laughable. Even an easy effect such as a laser blast looks bad here.” —Jeremy Conrad, IGN
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