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).
Michael Bay's third live-action Transformers film was another massive box-office hit—grossing over $1.1 billion—despite reviews that were lackluster at best. And "lackluster" might be overselling it, given that multiple critics described Dark of the Moon as "soul-sucking." Though Megan Fox opted out of the franchise following the second film, the cast features a mix of returning (Shia LaBeouf, Josh Duhamel, Tyrese Gibson) and new-to-the-series (John Malkovich, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley) stars. The latter group also includes Oscar-winner (but not for this film!) Frances McDormand, and Moon is the second-lowest-scoring film of her career. (If you're asking: This is the lowest-scoring one.) With three nominations for its sound and visual effects, Moon is also the last film in the series to receive any Oscar love.
“An improvement on Transformers 2, but then what isn't? To paraphrase the Bard, it's a tale, full of sound and fury and extremely stupid dialogue and nonsensical plotting and preposterous stunts and robots punching each other's heads off, signifying nothing.” —Chris Hewitt, Empire
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