Dangerous Toys: Terrible film adaptations that are nothing more than child’s play

This Friday (February 10) sees the release of The Lego Batman Movie and, much like its predecessor The Lego Movie, it’s both “certified fresh” and currently holding steady at 94 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. In honor of this massive achievement, we’d figured flip the script of positivity and make a list of the worst movies based on toy lines ever. If anything, it'll show how far we’ve come in our toy line adaptations.

As you scan through the selections below, you might wonder where the The Care Bears and Garbage Pail Kids are, but we decided to stick to actual physical as opposed to those spun off of greeting card characters and trading cards. We had to draw the line somewhere, or the Ewoks would have wound up on this list. Sure enough, even when you exclude those disasterpieces, there’s still plenty of terrible to go around.

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Jem and the Holograms [2015]

We wonder what the hell happened in the pitch meetings for this recent adaptation of the ’80s cartoon.

“Yo, let’s make a Jem and the Holograms live-action movie!”

“Sounds good! Let me get out my pumps and hairdy-”

“No, dude. That stuff blows. Kids today just can’t relate to all that big-haired ’80s nonsense. Let’s make her a viral sensation who has to wear a pink wig so people don’t know who she is, and let’s put the Holograms as obstacles to her success who think she’s betraying her roots by becoming famous. Can we have any scavenger hunts in the script, too? Oh, also, let’s kill off her dad and give her a robot. People love robots.”

“Fantastic! Who can we hire to be the bad corporate influence on her?”

“How about Juliette Lewis?”

“You’re a genius. And I’ve got a great idea for the director.”

“Yeah?”

“John M. Chu.”

It grossed $2.3 million on a $5 million budget. Good job, guys.

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