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).
After eight years of false starts, an animated musical feature based on the UglyDolls line of stuffed animals finally reached theaters in the summer of 2019. The Robert Rodriguez-produced film (he also has a story credit) was the first animated production for studio STX Films, and it features a popstar-heavy voice cast that includes Kelly Clarkson, Nick Jonas, Janelle Monáe, Pitbull, Charli XCX, Lizzo, and Blake Shelton, among others. But the big names on the poster didn't convince parents to take their kids to see the poorly reviewed film, and UglyDolls quickly became a box office dud—so much so that an announced animated TV spinoff series never materialized.
“The new animated film UglyDolls is a lazy flip, its main intention to foster the toy-aisle bond between kids and its quasi-hideous title characters.” —Barry Hertz, The Globe and Mail