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).
It's arguably not really suitable for this gallery—rather than an adaptation of a toy line, it's a movie about a toy line—but we'll include it just so we can once again show you a picture of star Zach Galifianakis without his usual beard. (It's truly unsettling.) In Apple's 2023 film The Beanie Bubble, Galifianakis plays Ty Warner, the head of the toy company responsible for the Beanie Babies craze of the 1990s. (Somehow, that line of stuffed toys has never been adapted to TV or film.) Elizabeth Banks, Sarah Snook, Geraldine Viswanathan, and Carl Clemons-Hopkins also star for first-time feature directors Kristin Gore and Damian Kulash; the latter, who also fronts OK Go, previously directed that band's legendary music videos.
“It proves more interesting in its chronicling of the business practices that made the Beanie Babies such a sensation, at least for a while, than in its portrait of personal dramas, the veracity of which obviously has to be called into question. Overall, the movie follows a by-now familiar trajectory, with the company’s mammoth success inevitably followed by its big fall.” —Frank Scheck, The Hollywood Reporter
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