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).
Director Jon M. Chu has made a career out of dance movies (Step Up 2: The Streets), musicals (In the Heights), and comedies (Crazy Rich Asians), but he has one action movie in his filmography: the 2013 sequel to G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra. G.I. Joe: Retaliation may be Chu's worst movie (not including Justin Bieber documentaries), but it actually scored nine points higher with critics than the first film. It also performed slightly better at the box office, likely thanks to the addition of Dwayne Johnson (and, to a lesser extent, Bruce Willis) to a returning cast led by Channing Tatum. But plans for a sequel fell through, and it would ultimately take eight years for the next G.I. Joe film—a reboot called Snake Eyes—to arrive.
“Offering a more straight-faced brand of idiocy than its cheerfully dumb 2009 predecessor, G.I. Joe: Retaliation might well have been titled 'G.I. Joe: Regurgitation,' advertising big guns, visual effects and that other line of Hasbro toys with the same joyless, chew-everything-up-and-spit-it-out efficiency.” —Variety
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