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).
We'll admit that every time we see that Metascore for Clue, it surprises us. A very underrated 1985 ensemble murder mystery comedy based on the classic board game, the Jonathan Lynn-directed Clue was a box office bomb despite a novel theatrical rollout which found three different versions of the film—labeled in newspaper ads (ask your parents) as the "A," "B," and "C" versions, each with a completely different ending—playing in cities simultaneously. A combined version including all three endings was released on cable and home video, where the funny script and even funnier cast (including Tim Curry, Madeline Kahn, Michael McKean, Martin Mull, Eileen Brennan, and Christopher Lloyd) eventually won over movie fans to the point where Clue is routinely cited as a cult classic.
A more serious, bigger-budget adaptation of the board game has been in various stages of preproduction for over a decade but remains nowhere close to filming.
“Lots of sight gags and one-liners are attempted, but few of them succeed. The cast is talented but stranded in weak material.” —Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
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