NEW YORK, NY.- A passing glance at this year’s Tony nominations might trick the viewer into thinking the wrong artistic medium has crept onto the list. Among the nominees are “The Notebook,” “The Outsiders” and “Days of Wine and Roses,” based on three movies: a 2004 Nicholas Sparks romance, a 1983 coming-of-age crime drama directed by Francis Ford Coppola and a 1962 Blake Edwards melodrama about alcoholism. (They were, in turn, based on bestselling novels and a TV play.)

It’s not that movie adaptations are uncommon in theater; a number of mega-budget shows have been driven by silver-screen nostalgia, whether it’s “Back to the Future” and “Aladdin” or that stalwart of the Broadway economy, “The Lion King.” Splashy musicals, in particular, often come from recognizable cinematic sources: There’s “Mean Girls,” “Moulin Rouge,” “Kinky Boots” and many more. Not all of them are hits, as “American Psycho,” “Almost Famous” and “New York, New York” prove.

Given how much theater relies on visitors buying tickets to an experience they know they’ll enjoy, it makes sense. Though there’s plenty of artistry on display in these productions, blockbuster adaptations can feel, to financiers, like slam dunks, safer bets than original material. The same nostalgia that drives sequels and reboots in cinema is at play: We know audiences like it, so let’s give them some more.

But intellectual property that’s bankable isn’t everything, and increasingly, interesting theater comes from movie sources hailing from left field. “Teeth,” for instance, a musical by Michael R. Jackson and Anna K. Jacobs, made a bloody, buzzy off-Broadway splash this winter at Playwrights Horizons; it’s based on a 2008 indie horror classic about a young woman with vagina dentata. Over at St. Ann’s in Brooklyn, Tobias Menzies starred in “The Hunt,” adapted by David Farr from Thomas Vinterberg’s 2013 Norwegian thriller.

Sitting in the audience, I was delighted by these shows even in the moments when they didn’t quite work. They felt inventive and thoughtful, as if the creators had ingested the films and then made them their own. After each curtain call, I left the theater thinking about what made the adaptation so interesting, and what it showed about the power of both cinema and theater.

For instance, “Days of Wine and Roses,” a morality tale about the evils of booze, is based on a film that leans into pedantic after-school special territory. But the production rode not on plot so much as on the musical performances of its stars, Brian d’Arcy James and Kelli O’Hara, who landed a nomination apiece — and they were splendid. The acting was also key to “The Outsiders,” which, despite its pedigree (and its own source material, S.E. Hinton’s bestselling novel), is more cult classic than mainstream favorite. Its excellent translation to the stage stands brilliantly on its own legs in large part because of its kinetic cast: The performances are loaded with all the charisma and longing these teenage characters demand. Both theatrical productions also depend on songs that were not present in their source films, exposing fresh, raw nerves in the stories.

These join a relatively recent spate of adaptations of independent films, the kind found at Sundance, that have graced New York’s stages in recent years and garnered both fans and awards. The films of 2007, for instance, have provided great fodder years after their release: “Once” (based on John Carney’s movie musical) opened on Broadway in 2012, “Waitress” (based on Adrienne Shelly’s romantic drama) opened in 2016, and “The Band’s Visit” (based on Eran Kolirin’s comedy) opened in 2017. Each film told an intimate story about friendship and love found in unexpected places, and onstage they eschewed splash and flash to retain that sense of modest humanity. As films, they had all had a measure of success and acclaim. Onstage, they were phenomena.

Even documentaries can translate to the stage: See “Grey Gardens” (2006), based on the groundbreaking 1975 Maysles brothers film, or the forthcoming “The Queen of Versailles,” based on Lauren Greenfield’s 2012 documentary.

And unlikely pairings crop up, too, in Stephen Sondheim’s final work, “Here We Are,” which premiered off-Broadway last year. It draws on two movies directed by Luis Buñuel: “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” (1972) and “The Exterminating Angel” (1962). Both are masterworks of cinema, but they’re more often seen at the art house or in the classroom than on, say, an airplane. Buñuel is not exactly a laid-back crowd-pleaser. The show wasn’t either, but it was at least an intriguing concept.

The border between theater and film, of course, has always been porous. Stage adaptations of films have had their reverse counterparts since Hollywood’s early decades, when plays and musicals were translated into a great deal of the silver screen’s most iconic works, like “Casablanca” and “A Streetcar Named Desire.” Playwrights often made the shift to Hollywood to work as screenwriters, and over the decades that bicoastal move has been common. The stage was loaded with ripe material for studios, to be sure, but some plays also came with the imprimatur of serious art, which meant that elements that might have been eschewed in the decades of the censorious Hays Code could slip through. The film adaptation of Edward Albee’s 1962 play “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” which contained profanity technically proscribed in Hollywood at the time, was one of the films responsible for the disintegration of the code.

But when it comes to contemporary film-to-stage adaptations, there seems to be two camps. There are the nostalgia shows, based on popular intellectual property and an expectation that the audience knows and loves the material. “Back to the Future,” for instance, currently on Broadway, is more or less an eye-popping, one-to-one transfer from film to stage, featuring songs loaded with jokes that mostly functioned as fan service. An extreme recent example of this was Ian Shaw and Joseph Nixon’s play “The Shark Is Broken,” which took as its setting the filming of “Jaws,” and made no sense at all if you weren’t steeped in “Jaws” lore.

The other camp faces bigger hurdles. You might not have even heard of the original, and so the productions can’t rely upon the audience’s memories. These shows also take for granted that fans who do know the underlying story are ready to encounter it in a new way. “The Notebook,” based on a weepie classic that fans rewatch endlessly, opted to reimagine its material, leaving the basic plot and emotional core intact while significantly mixing up how it’s presented. The result works powerfully, even if you’ve never seen the movie; if you have, it’s like a fresh lens, a cover of a favorite song that works all on its own.

In a time when theater, always precarious, feels as if it’s teetering on the brink, and Hollywood is barely hanging on, it’s fascinating to see theater-makers turning toward less obviously commercial movie properties for new works. For the work to succeed, there needs to be a willingness to experiment with the underlying property.

What’s striking to me, watching the second category of shows as a film critic, is the kind of fresh insight they bring to the underlying material. After all, theater presents restrictions to artists that filmmakers don’t encounter — there’s no editing, no multiple takes, no reliance on green screens, no “fixing it in post.” And the way plots and characters operate in many films aims for a realism that’s almost inherently absent on the stage. Theater requires the audience to engage in a much higher level of suspension of disbelief, and so the writing changes, forced into finding a truly fresh angle on the original. For film fans weary of reboots that barely bother to reimagine their source material in interesting ways, theatrical adaptations feel like a shot in the arm.

There are more to come. Productions of “Death Becomes Her” (based on Robert Zemeckis’ 1992 satirical black comedy) and “Good Night, and Good Luck” (based on the 2005 drama directed by George Clooney, who will star in the Broadway show) have been announced in recent weeks. And while Disney has been in the theater game for a long time, producing shows at the New Amsterdam Theater, other film companies are eyeing the stage, too. In 2023, the indie darling movie production company A24 bought the Cherry Lane Theater, a small but venerable venue in Greenwich Village. Netflix is a co-producer on “Patriots,” which nabbed a Tony nomination for its star, Michael Stuhlbarg.

Nobody knows what the future holds for the entertainment industry, and theater is, if anything, an even riskier business than movies. But it’s exciting to see the age-old relationship between the cinema and the stage take on a new tenor — and perhaps it can help reinvigorate both arts.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.