Saturday afternoon, any given multiplex, pre-Covid. The credits roll. We rise and shuffle, still brushing popcorn husks off our fronts. And it’s about now that you’ll hear the braying of the literati in the row behind: “Well, obviously, the book is always better than the film.” It is a viewpoint as old as cinema itself. I wasn’t at the premiere of Alice in Wonderland’s silent-film adaptation in 1903, but it’s a safe bet that someone piped up afterwards to say that it wasn’t fit to stitch the leather binding of Lewis Carroll’s 1865 novel. They probably weren’t sure about the casting of the White Rabbit, either. And so, this cultural snipe has echoed through the ages. The book is always better than the film. It just is. But is it, really? Firstly, if you have already read the book, of course the film won’t seem as good. You’ve already travelled along the narrative arc. The characters have already taken form in your mind’s eye, and they look nothing like Tom Cruise’s platform-heeled Jack Reacher or Sean Connery’s “overgrown stuntman” Bond (as Ian Fleming would have it). You have already experienced the rug-pulling twists, too, such as Fight Club’s Tyler Durden turning out to be the embodiment of the narrator’s schizophrenia. Oh, sorry. You knew that, right? Whereas, if you watch the film first, the book loses its page-turning power, because we see it all coming: the Hogwarts Express; the Wizard of Oz’s unmasking; Boo Radley saving the day. But you don’t see cinephiles tossing literary classics from their shelves: “Yeah, yeah, there’s a mad woman in the attic. Change the record, Brontë … ” Perhaps there is another factor at play here. When we say the book is better, we’re announcing that we read, we’re cultured, we feed our brains something loftier than big, colourful moving images. This is rooted in the stubborn snobbism that film is the weak sibling of the arts. “Over the years, I’ve grown used to seeing the cinema dismissed as an artform,” wrote Martin Scorsese in 2017. “It’s tainted by commercial considerations … there are too many people involved in its creation … it ‘leaves nothing to the imagination’.” Nobody has ever said the book is better than the play. We’d be terrified of someone countering that we’ve just misunderstood Sir Trevor Nunn’s mise-en-scène. The best a film adaptation can hope for is that it’s deemed better than the rollercoaster, like Pirates of the Caribbean. Actually, when you line them up, the film often leaves the book for dust. Would you rather slog through Peter Benchley’s Jaws (in which, boringly, the shark slowly succumbs to its wounds)? Or choose Mario Puzo’s The Godfather over Brando’s hamster-pouching charisma? Has any child ever laughed harder at Beatrix Potter’s finger-wagging tales than when James Corden’s Peter Rabbit pumped Mr McGregor with 10,000 volts? And Tolkien fans might toss me into Mount Doom for saying this, but if you would rather digest marathon descriptions of irritatingly named dwarves, instead of being sprayed with the glorious multisensory spectacle of Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit, then God help you. So, no, the written word is not always better than the silver screen. If you disagree, you can throw the book at me in the comments.