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 spinoff from 2014's The LEGO Movie is an irreverent DC Comics/LEGO mashup that finds Will Arnett reprising his role from the first film as the LEGO version of Bruce Wayne/Batman alongside Michael Cera's Robin, Rosario Dawson's Batgirl, Ralph Fiennes' Pennyworth, and Zach Galifianakis as Joker. It's the directorial debut for Robot Chicken veteran Chris McKay (who has since gone on to direct a few live-action films like 2023's Renfield) and it is both the second-best LEGO film and the third-best Batman film in history (when ranked by Metascores).
“The filmmakers’ fondness and respect for all things Batman are what elevate The Lego Batman Movie past the trappings of a funny cartoon. Who could have guessed, in the era of non-stop comic-book pictures, that a movie that uses toys as protagonist would do the most justice to the enigmatic Bruce Wayne?” —Rene Rodriguez, The Miami Herald