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).
To the delight of headline writers everywhere, Battleship did, in fact, sink at the box office. Directed by Peter Berg (Friday Night Lights), the big-budget 2012 sci-fi action film pitting the U.S. Navy against alien invaders is "adapted" from the classic Milton Bradley/Hasbro board game—to the extent that a work of narrative fiction could ever be adapted from a plotless game in which players guess grid coordinates and place plastic pegs in plastic ship models. A cast led by Rihanna (in her film debut), Taylor Kitsch, and one of the Skarsgårds—let's say Alexander—and the promise of effects-heavy action sequences were not enough to overcome skepticism by moviegoers and poor reviews from critics, and Battleship wound up losing an estimated $150 million despite grossing $300 million. Those losses, in turn, prompted Universal to unwind a major deal with Hasbro to adapt additional board games.
“This is the kind of summer movie that softens your brain tissue without even providing the endocrine burst of pleasure that would make it all worthwhile.” —Dana Stevens, Slate
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