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).
In 1983, Mattel brought its new Masters of the Universe action figure line to television audiences with the cartoon series He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. The show proved popular—so much so that producers greenlit a spinoff series, She-Ra: Princess of Power, two years later. But before the latter show debuted in the fall of 1985, the first five episodes of the upcoming series were edited together into a feature-length movie, The Secret of the Sword, and released into theaters. While not exactly a hit—and certainly not what one might call "good"—Sword made a modest profit. But no more animated He-Man adaptations would follow; instead, the franchise would attempt a switch to live-action ... and we'll get to that in a moment.
“Little children may like it, but they won't be richer for it.” —The Christian Science Monitor