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).
There have now been four films based on the ever-popular LEGO toy brick line, and all but one has been warmly greeted by reviewers. The lone exception? The LEGO Ninjago Movie, a spinoff of the original LEGO Movie based on LEGO's line of teen ninja figurines and featuring the voices of Dave Franco, Fred Armisen, Michael Peña, Kumail Nanjiani, Jackie Chan, and Abbi Jacobson. Ninjago had previously been adapted into a popular and long-running Cartoon Network series prior to making the jump to theaters in 2017, but the movie fared relatively poorly, grossing far less (just $123 million) than the other three LEGO films to date to go with its middling reviews. Critics felt that out of the four films, this is the one that felt more like a toy commercial than an engrossing adventure.
“The Lego Ninjago movie isn’t any worse than any number of professionally made but unexciting cartoons aimed at kids, and sometimes a gag will pop through with the same high-energy surprise that powered so much of The Lego Movie.” —Jesse Hassenger, A.V. Club
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