10 movies based on toys (that are actually decent)

published 21 July 2023

The Barbie movie sounds like the stuff of a daydream. There have been more than 40 Barbie movies to date, but instead of a cheap TV film, this Barbie is set to be one of the biggest movies of the year.

It’s directed by one of the brightest lights in modern film-making, Greta Gerwig. And it stars Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling.

This is one the most important movies based on a real-world toy ever made. But is it the best? We’ve dug through the archives to find the best toy movies made so far, and we have not made it easy.

Stories based on purely fictional toys like Small Soldiers and, err, Jingle All the Way? They’re out. We’re only including one movie per toy franchise too, in order to avoid stacking the deck with Lego films.

Ready to play? Let’s go. Vote for your personal favourites.

10 movies based on toys

There were two obvious picks for our top LEGO movie. 2014’s The LEGO Movie and 2017’s LEGO Batman. The latter tops many lists of the best based on this toy set, but we are going to side with the original for this one. It was such a revelation with it came out, such an unlikely creative success. And it worked on just about every level, for younger kids, parents and adults with no children in tow at all. We can even just about bear to hear the Everything Is Awesome song again, finally, a decade on.

OK, the main heroes of Toy Story are not licensed from existing toys. But there sure are a lot of them in the wider cast. Mr Potato Head? Etch a Sketch? Magic 8 Ball? If you do a bit of research you’ll find even Woody and Buzz were inspired by real toys, although we’re pretty glad Woody doesn’t look like the Howdy Doody puppet from the 50s. That’s even more terrifying than the broken toys from Toy Story 2. There are no duds in the Toy Story movie series. Pick your own from 1-4.

D&D fans may be aghast at the idea this hobby, this way of life, is a toy series. But it kinda is, right? And we’re also keen to give Dungeons and Dragons: Honour Among Thieves a shout-out whenever we can as it is 2 hours 14 minutes of pure cinematic good times. Chris Pine stars as our charming, goofy hero, alongside a band of adventurers including Michelle Rodriguez’s Holga, who encapsulate the sense of freewheeling adventure present in the best D&D campaigns.

He-Man vehicle Masters of the Universe is a famously poor film. It was a box office flop, and received almost universally negative reviews in 1987. However, over the years it has become a cult classic firmly rooted in the “so bad it’s good" tradition. We’ve mostly included it because following multiple childhood watches, Frank Langhella’s Skeletor is indelibly etched in our brain. Best approached with popcorn and, if it’s your thing, a few beers.

Almost all the Transformers movies are duds, if we put on our film snob chapeau for a minute. But 2018’s Bumblebee is an altogether different type of movie, one of a smaller scale that focuses more on character rather than just clashing weightless CGI metal. It had the smallest budget of all the modern Transformers movies too. And, sure, it also earned the least at the box office bar the most recent Rise of the Beats from 2023. Still, it has earned a place in our hearts.

The G.I. Joe series of films had such a bad run from 2009 to 2013 that 2021’s Snake Eyes left the toy name out of its title completely in many instances. Its full name is Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins, and stars the ever-charming Henry Golding as the eponymous Snake Eyes, one of the original members of the G.I. Joe team. It performed poorly at the box office, but is at least much more watchable than 2009’s The Rise of Cobra and 2013’s Retaliation.

Trolls could have been a gross, cynical cash-in, a bandwagon jumper. But it’s a genuinely entertaining, fun-packed watch, a musical with songs including The Sound of Silence and True Colours. Anna Kendrick stars as lead Poppy. And, boy, have some of the other casting choices not aged that well — Russell Brand, Jeffrey Tambor and James Corden among them. The follow-up from 2020 Trolls World Tour was also a quality family flick, but was one of the early victims of pandemic cinema closures.

You may think of the Ouija board as some sort of folk artefact from many years past. But it’s a licensed Hasbro toy, and the perfect fodder for a silly horror film. Skip 2014’s Ouija and head right for 2016’s Ouija: Origin of Evil. It’s creepy and zippy, which comes as no great surprise when you see who was at its helm. This is a Mike Flanagan joint, the director behind Hush, the sometimes falsely maligned Doctor Sleep and the fabulous TV trio of The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor and Midnight Mass.

Andrew Williams has written about tech for a decade. He has written for a stack of magazines and websites including Wired, TrustedReviews, TechRadar and Stuff.