It’s an argument as old as cinema itself… well, pretty much – can a movie ever be as good as or better than the book it’s based on?

From early cinema’s adaptations (official and otherwise), of Dracula and Frankenstein, through the Bond franchise adding Fleming’s titles to their own stories, right up to the Marvel Cinematic Universe adjusting the themes of comics to suit their own success, viewers have been complaining “the films are never as good as the book” for the best part of a century now.

But are they always right? We here at Late Reviewer reckon there are some pretty clear examples where the adaptation has improved on the source material… and here are three of them.