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).
One of director Tim Burton's lowest-scoring movies but a cult classic nevertheless (much like Burton's lowest-scoring and most underrated film, Pee-wee's Big Adventure), this over-the-top 1996 live-action/animation hybrid is one of Burton's funniest films despite a storyline involving an at times brutal alien invasion of Earth. Mars Attacks! is adapted from the relatively obscure 1962 Topps trading card series of the same name (later re-released shortly before the film) and was designed by Burton to be a bit of an homage to both the sci-fi films of auteur (that can't be the right word) Ed Wood and the disaster movies popular in the 1970s. In the spirit of the latter, Mars Attacks! features a huge, star-studded ensemble cast that includes Jack Nicholson, Annette Bening, Glenn Close, Natalie Portman, Michael J. Fox, Sarah Jessica Parker, Pam Grier, Martin Short, Danny DeVito, Pierce Brosnan, Jim Brown, Jack Black, Rod Steiger, and singer Tom Jones (playing himself), among others. (It even features authentic B-movie stars Joe Don Baker and Rance Howard.) But the big names did not draw audiences, and the film is considered a box office dud.
“The picture is lacking in the uproarious humor that might well have ensued from the material, which instead inspires occasional laughs but, much more often, bemused fascination and wonderment at the bizarre imaginations and impressive skill of the filmmakers.” —Todd McCarthy, Variety
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