The Toy

The Toy is a 1982 American comedy about Jack Brown, a former journalist who now works as a janitor in a department store owned by the wealthy Ulysses Simpson Bates. Bates's young son Eric, who lives mostly with his mother and visits his father only briefly each year, is taken to the store after hours and allowed to pick out any gift he wants. Eric chooses Jack himself, and the employee is delivered to the boy's home to serve as a live-in playmate. What begins as a one-sided arrangement, with Jack enduring humiliations at the hands of a spoiled child, slowly develops into a genuine friendship that teaches Eric something about how to treat other people.

The film was directed by Richard Donner, the third of the eighteen features he directed in chronological order, following Superman and preceding The Goonies. Carol Sobieski wrote the screenplay, and Phil Feldman and Ray Stark produced. Richard Pryor stars as Jack, with Jackie Gleason as Bates, Ned Beatty as Sydney Morehouse, Scott Schwartz as Eric, Teresa Ganzel as Fancy Bates and Wilfrid Hyde-White as Barkley. It is a remake of the 1976 French film Le Jouet.

Made for a budget of 28 million dollars, the film took in 47 million worldwide. Reception has been mixed: it holds a rating of 5.8 out of 10 on IMDb from around 15,000 votes and 5.9 out of 10 on TMDB from 236 votes, while film critics gave it 4 out of 10 across 31 reviews, a lower figure than either audience score.