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).
A 21st century rival to Barbie dolls, the Bratz toy line was adapted into a live-action comedy film 16 years before Barbie was—though without any of the buzz (or the success). Directed by family film specialist Sean McNamara, Bratz is a high school-set comedy (intentional or not) starring Logan Browning, Janel Parrish, Skyler Shaye, Nathalia Ramos, and (as the principal) an out-of-place Jon Voight. Despite arriving after a successful animated TV series adaptation (and an animated straight-to-video Bratz feature), the formulaic-to-a-fault Bratz failed to make a dent at the box office and is one of the worst films of 2007.
“A live-action film based on a line of dolls, it's pure marketing chum for tweeners: a proudly shallow, purposefully bland ode to girly-girl narcissism. I could actually feel my brain stem shrivel up as I watched it.” —Ty Burr, The Boston Globe