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).
The first live-action film based on Hasbro's shapeshifting toy line, 2007's Transformers arrived at a time when the toys were well past their 1980s prime and all of the various TV cartoon adaptations had ceased production. Oh, and the one previous film adaptation was both (a) a misguided failure and (b) two decades in the past. Not quite a recipe for success, right? But who needs logic when you have big-budget explosions: Not only was Transformers a colossal hit, but it also spawned an enormously successful film franchise that has so far grossed over $5 billion across seven films (with more to come).
Produced by Steven Spielberg and directed by Michael Bay, the often comedic Transformers stars Shia LaBeouf and Megan Fox as two of the human heroes aiding the alien Autobots in a battle against their evil counterparts, the Decepticons. (Both, like the toys, are robots who can transform themselves into common Earth vehicles.) Also starring is Peter Cullen, who voiced Autobot leader Optimus Prime in the 1980s cartoon series and does the same in the film (and all of its sequels). Long the only Transformers movie with positive reviews (until the 2018 release of prequel Bumblebee), Transformers is also the sole movie in Bay's entire career as a director to receive a green Metascore.
“In previous movies, Michael Bay dabbled wearily in Homo sapiens. At last he has summoned the courage to admit that he has an exclusive crush on machines, and I congratulate him on creating, in Transformers, his first truly honest work of art.” —Anthony Lane, The New Yorker
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