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).
Intended as a martial arts-oriented reboot to the live-action film series adapted from the Hasbro toy soldier line, 2021's Snake Eyes finds Robert Schwentke (Red, The Divergent Series) directing a cast led by Henry Golding, Andrew Koji, and Samara Weaving. No, that's not quite the equivalent of the previous films' bigger names like Channing Tatum, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Dennis Quaid, and the difference showed at the box office: Snake Eyes grossed a meager $40 million, making it one of the biggest box office flops of the pandemic era. Its poor performance caused the cancellation of a planned G.I. Joe television series and has put the future of the film series—including a potential crossover with the Transformers series—in jeopardy.
“The drama is muddled, the action is murky, and the storyline can’t help but get goofier and goofier until, by the end, every attempt this movie makes to ground the 'G.I. Joe' series gets blown up. It’s hardly the worst film the 'G.I. Joe' series has delivered, but it’s certainly the least interesting.” —William Bibbiani, The Wrap
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