Need More Post-Barbie Nostalgia? Stream These Top Toy-Based Movies

We love to talk about movies and TV shows that are based on video games—mostly because they've been almost uniformly terrible. At least until this year, when The Super Mario Bros Movie and The Last of Us adaptation on Max finally put that curse to rest.

But now, all the talk is about a movie based on a toy, not a game. Barbie premiered in a head-to-head fight (or love-fest?) with Oppenheimer, pulling in $155 million on its opening weekend to Oppenheimer's $80.5 million, both of which are record debuts.

This caused JustWatch to wonder: Which movies also based on toys are the most popular of all time? Delving into its on-site popularity scores, JustWatch determined that the combined might of the four-film Toy Story franchise from Disney/Pixar is the big winner. But ahead of the first appearance of Woody and Buzz are two films that have the highest positive scores.

That's right: 2007's Transformers, the original and still best of that series claims the win as most popular. A couple other films in the franchise appear further down in the list. Maybe it's a stretch to call the number-two film toy-based, but no geek will be upset that this year's Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves does so well in any ranking—it's the first film of this type that actually feels like a D&D campaign with snarky friends. Also appearing here to represent the bricks: The Lego Movie and The Lego Batman Movie.

But that's not really as interesting as the second chart from JustWatch, below: It turns out that the new movie is far from Barbie's first foray into film. There are several animated Barbie features currently streaming, most of them available for rent or purchase. And at least one—the first Barbie animated flick from 2004, called Barbie as The Princess & the Pauper—outscores all the films above in popularity.

About Our Expert

Eric Griffith

Senior Editor, Features

My Experience

I've been writing about computers, the internet, and technology professionally since 1992, more than half of that time with PCMag. I arrived at the end of the print era of PC Magazine as a senior writer. I served for a time as managing editor of business coverage before settling back into the features team for the last decade and a half. I write features on all tech topics, plus I handle several special projects, including the Readers' Choice and Business Choice surveys and yearly coverage of the Best ISPs and Best Gaming ISPs, Best Products of the Year, and Best Brands (plus the Best Brands for Tech Support, Longevity, and Reliability).

I started in tech publishing right out of college, writing and editing stories about hardware and development tools. I migrated to software and hardware coverage for families, and I spent several years exclusively writing about the then-burgeoning technology called Wi-Fi. I was on the founding staff of several magazines, including Windows Sources, FamilyPC, and Access Internet Magazine. All of which are now defunct, and it's not my fault. I have freelanced for publications as diverse as Sony Style, Playboy.com, and Flux. I got my degree at Ithaca College in, of all things, television/radio. But I minored in writing so I'd have a future.

In my long-lost free time, I wrote some novels, a couple of which are not just on my hard drive: BETA TEST ("an unusually lighthearted apocalyptic tale," according to Publishers' Weekly) and a YA book called KALI: THE GHOSTING OF SEPULCHER BAY. Go get them on Kindle.

I work from my home in Ithaca, NY, and did it long before pandemics made it cool.

The Technology I Use

My first computer was a Laser 128, an Apple II-compatible clone with an integrated keyboard, matched with an eye-straining monochrome green monitor. I used it to type papers in college for other people for money...until I discovered the Mac SE in the college computer room. That changed my life. My first cellphone was a Samsung Uproar—the silver one with the built-in MP3 player from the Napster days (the pre-iPod era).

I use an iPhone 15 Pro hourly and an iPad Air infrequently (but I'm always in the market for a cheap Android tablet). I have a PlayStation 5 just to play Spider-Man, and several Windows machines, including a work-issued Lenovo ThinkPad. I talk to Alexa and Siri all day long. I do the majority of my computing on a 15-inch LG Gram laptop attached to a Thunderbolt hub to run a multi-monitor setup—I overdid it on the power needed to simply work from home.

I'm most at home in Microsoft Word after decades of writing there. More and more, I turn to services like Google Docs, using tools like Grammarly. I use Google's Chrome browser due to an addiction to several extensions I think I can't live without, but probably could. I use Excel extensively on data-intensive stories, but for chart creation, we've switched over entirely to using Infogram for interactive features that are hard to find elsewhere. I do a lot of graphics work for my stories, but limit myself to the free and amazing Paint.NET software to edit images.

I'm a firm evangelist for using the cloud for backup and syncing of files; I'm primarily using Dropbox, which has never failed me, but I also have redundant setups on Microsoft OneDrive, plus extra picture backups on Amazon Photos and iCloud. Why take chances? For entertainment, mine is a streaming-only household—my kid has never seen network TV and barely been exposed to commercials, thanks to Roku and Amazon Music. The house is peppered with smart speakers from Amazon for instant gratification and control of smart home devices like multiple Wyze cameras and Nest Protect smoke detectors. I've got accounts on all the major social networks, to my horror. I have a robot vacuum for each floor of the house. I want a 3D printer, but not sure what I'd use it for.

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