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).
Despite being one of the most popular children's toys for decades, LEGO didn't appear on screen in TV or film until 2003's straight-to-home-video feature Bionicle: Mask of Light—perhaps because it wasn't immediately obvious that construction sets featuring hundreds of plastic bricks and IKEA-worthy instruction manuals would lend themselves to a narrative setting. That didn't deter the writer-director team of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, 21 Jump Street), who were the first filmmakers to bring LEGO to the big screen. A CGI-animated comedy about a LEGO minifig who leads a resistance movement against an evil businessman seeking to literally glue the LEGO world together, the wildly inventive, franchise-launching 2014 film featured an all-star voice cast led by Chris Pratt, Will Ferrell, Will Arnett, Elizabeth Banks, Morgan Freeman, Liam Neeson, and more, and even spawned a hit song ("Everything Is Awesome" performed by Tegan and Sara with The Lonely Island). Though it somehow failed to receive an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Film, The LEGO Movie was indeed named exactly that by numerous critic groups after receiving terrific reviews and becoming one of the most surprising box office hits of 2014 with nearly $470 million in worldwide grosses.
“A clever, vividly imagined, consistently funny, eye-poppingly pretty and oddly profound movie … about Legos.” —Dana Stevens, Slate
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