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 highest-grossing toy-to-film adaptation in the United States (outside of Pixar's Toy Story franchise, which we are including in this gallery but isn't a direct toy adaptation), 2009's Revenge of the Fallen was the first sequel to 2007's Transformers and directed, like its predecessor, by Michael Bay. Stars Shia LaBeouf and Megan Fox also returned for the sequel, which grossed over $100 more than the well-reviewed first film despite a negative reaction from critics—a pattern (high grosses, low Metascores) that would become the franchise norm.
“This is blockbuster porn absent even the suggestion of care or concern for anything that might resemble 'a point,' save the obvious one to move more Hasbro action figures and animated-series DVD boxed sets. In a word: distasteful.” —Robert Wilonsky
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