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).
Released 31 years after the first big-screen My Little Pony adaptation (another animated family musical with the same title), 2017's My Little Pony: The Movie again featured a better-than-expected voice cast (including Uzo Aduba, Zoe Saldaña, Emily Blunt, Sia, Taye Diggs, Kristin Chenoweth, and Liev Schreiber). Unlike the first film, it was a profitable box office success, even if critics didn't like it a whole lot better. Probably helping the second film was a growing fanbase—including, famously, among teens and adults—for the then-current animated TV series My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. But there were fewer bronies among critics, who cautioned that moviegoers over the age of 5 would find little to interest them.
“Imagine eating a giant bag of Skittles, then throwing it all up in a fit of sugar-induced nausea and you’ll have some idea of what it feels like to sit through My Little Pony: The Movie.” —Christy Lemire, RogerEbert.com