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).
Dungeons & Dragons may be the most popular tabletop role-playing game of all time, but translating the game to the medium of film has been a surprisingly bumpy journey—surprising given that the game's classic fantasy elements would seem well suited to the big screen. This decade-in-the-making 2000 debut feature from Courtney Solomon is the first live-action D&D film, and it stars Justin Whalin (Lois & Clark's Jimmy Olsen), Marlon Wayans, Thora Birch, and Jeremy Irons in a dragon-filled adventure—or would be, if the acting weren't so bad and the effects didn't look so cheap. Despite being a major commercial failure in addition to a critical one, Dungeons & Dragons actually received two direct sequels, though neither was released in theaters.
“Dungeons & Dragons looks like they threw away the game and photographed the box it came in.” —Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times