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).
Among European toy brands, Playmobil has long played second fiddle to LEGO. So when the former's German owners attempted to duplicate LEGO's recent movie success and bring Playmobil to the big screen as an animated family musical film in 2019, the disappointing results were somewhat predictable. But only to an extent: No one could have foreseen just how much of a disaster Playmobil: The Movie would turn out to be. Reviled by critics who cited terrible writing and lackluster music—and warned that it was not in the same league as The LEGO Movie—Playmobil ultimately grossed just $16 million against a production budget in excess of $40 million following what was one of the worst opening weekends in box office history.
“This is a vastly inferior toy-to-film IP expansion, with duller songs, dumber jokes, and forgettable voice work.” —Kimberley Jones, The Austin Chronicle
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