Movies Based on Toys and Games, Ranked Worst to Best

by Jason Dietz, Metacritic Features Editor – July 22, 2023

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).

23 of 46 photo by Paramount Pictures

42 #23 (tie): Transformers: Rise of the Beasts

Out of all the Transformers films—and there certainly seem to be a lot of them—Rise of the Beasts will always be the most recent ... at least until next year. The 2023 film and seventh overall in the live-action series is both a sequel to 2018's Bumblebee and a prequel to the first Transformers film. As such, it features an all-new cast (led by Anthony Ramos and Dominique Fishback), and also features a relatively untested director in Steven Caple Jr. (whose only two prior films include Creed II). Lacking the star power of prior Transformers films, Beasts grossed just $422 million, making it easily the least commercially successful entry in the franchise to date.

“It’s the safe and simplistic course correction that—neutered of the very absurdist immensity that was this franchise’s calling card, if not its sole reason for existing—lands with a crashing thud.” —Nick Schager, The Daily Beast

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