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).
Are all of the remaining films in our list part of the Toy Story franchise? They certainly are. And while the beloved Pixar film series—one of (and possibly the) most critically acclaimed franchises of all time—isn't actually adapted from or based on a specific pre-existing toy line, all four films are populated by iconic kids' toys in addition to Pixar-created characters like Buzz Lightyear. Among the classic toys that come to life in the series are a Mr. Potato Head (voiced by Don Rickles) and a Slinky Dog (Jim Varney/Blake Clark), along with appearances by an Etch A Sketch, a Magic 8-Ball, troll dolls, toy soldiers, a See 'n Say, and many more. Even Woody (Tom Hanks) is an amalgam of various cowboy and pull-string toys popular in the 1950s.
Released in 2019 after a nine-year gap between films, the road-trip adventure Toy Story 4 received terrific reviews and won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature en route to grossing more than $1 billion worldwide. It's also, somehow, the worst film in the series (not including the non-toy-based spinoff Lightyear). Will there be a Toy Story 5? Let's put it this way: Would you pass up a chance to make another $1 billion?
“It doesn’t put you through the emotional wringer the way its predecessor did, but it’s consistently inventive, funny, witty, and heartfelt. In other words, it’s a lot better than it has any right to be. It’s more than good enough to justify its existence.” —Peter Rainer, The Christian Science Monitor
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