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 third animated feature based on the stuff bear line, 1987's Wonderland traps your favorite Care Bears inside a fantastical story based on Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland stories. (The character of Alice in the film is not a bear but a human, but being surrounded by colorful talking bears is the least of her problems.) The film's poor box office performance made it the final theatrically released Care Bears movie for two decades.
“What's the differences between the Care Bears television show on Saturday morning and The Care Bears' Adventure in Wonderland...? The movie is longer, and you will have to pay money to see it - about as much as it appears the producers spent to make it.” —Caryn James, The New York Times