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).
Like the much later Ouija, this 1986 supernatural horror film finds a series of terrifying events triggered by the use of a Ouija board. Unlike Ouija, the earlier film didn't have a license from game company Parker Brothers (later Hasbro)—hence the title Witchboard. The low-budget debut film from writer-director Kevin S. Tenney (who would next direct cult classic Night of the Demons) was actually a modest hit during its original run despite a lack of positive reviews.
“Junk, but amusing junk.” —Hal Boedeker, The Miami Herald