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).
Though it sounds like it should be the name of a character from Threat Level Midnight, Max Steel is, of course, a Mattel action figure line dating back to 1999 (and not to be confused with Maxx Steele, a separate toy from a rival company). The toy and character of Max—a teen athlete with superpowers—have been rebooted several times over the past decades and have been featured in two different animated series and several straight-to-home-video features. But it wasn't until 2016 that Max got his first live-action film adaptation starring Ben Winchell as the title character. Given that Max Steel barely eked out $6 million at the box office amid dismal reviews, it may also be the final live-action film adaptation.
“A movie based on a toy should be a whole lot more fun than this.” —Christy Lemire, RogerEbert.com