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).
A line of shapeshifting mecha toys that launched in 1984 in both Japan (via Takara) and the United States (from Hasbro), Transformers would quickly spawn a seemingly infinite media franchise that would eventually include multiple cartoon series (and animated films), numerous comics and books, over a dozen videogame adaptations, and—beginning in 2007—an implausibly lucrative live-action sci-fi/action film series.
There have been seven live-action Transformers films to date, and the worst—and thus first, in our gallery—of those is 2017's The Last Knight, also the lowest-grossing film in the franchise outside of the spinoff Bumblebee. The fifth film in the series and the final Transformers film directed by Michael Bay, Last Knight stars Mark Wahlberg (back from the prior film) alongside series regulars Josh Duhamel and John Turturro and new-to-the-series Anthony Hopkins. Critics panned the film as incoherent, boring, and stupid, and by some accounts Last Knight managed to lose money for Paramount despite grossing more than $600 million worldwide.
“It’s all about as exciting as watching two drawings fight each other on a computer monitor.” —Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle
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