There is a lot of research on the difference effects on your brain of reading or watching images and audio. I found a few on the first page of Google search.
http://www.nationalreadingcampaign.ca/p ... ual-books/https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/th ... d-functionhttp://sharpbrains.com/blog/2013/07/05/ ... v-tonight/The answer to the question is not easy. You may have to read a script to fully engage parts of your brain but you may also insert or substitute images that the author did not intend.
I had an ongoing argument about the benefits of TV with a friend of mine. It went on for years and years until he passed away. He insisted TV made people stupid but he was an intellectual and I suspected prejudices were at work in his argument. My argument has always been that reading should be accompanied by visual experience. Reading give you the ability to think clearly but visual experience is the equivalent to a theories test. There is a feedback process necessary to confirm that what you thought was described is what was actually being described. There is an old saying that you should not believe anything you hear and only half of what you see.
My eyesight has gotten pretty poor over the years and I now listen to a lot of what I would have once read. To some extent I prefer reading because you can skip over the mundane and reread the difficult to understand. I can't imagine trying to listen to a scientific paper even if you didn't need the graphics. I suspect the same problem exists when watching "art" as you can't take in the whole picture at once because it movies so quickly. You could watch the same clip over and over but who wants to do that.
We also need to address the problem from the other side or the producers. It would be impossible in most cases for the script writer's concept to be perfectly reproduced. We have already covered the difficulty of verbally describing something to make a perfect copy but the same problem exists in transforming an idea into an image.