Many of Walter Benjamin's writings on film were, in some sense, belated. When, for example, he engaged in the polemics with Oscar A. H. Schmitz about Battleship Potemkin (Bronenosets Potemkin, dir. Sergei M. Eisenstein, 1925), debate around the film had already raged in Germany for almost a year. When he decided to support Vertov overtly in the 1939 version of ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’, mentioning a film from five years earlier, Three Songs of Lenin (Tri pesni o Lenine, 1934), Vertov had long ago moved away from the front line of Soviet cinema and been accused of formalism. When Benjamin started to write about Chaplin, his most transgressive period had also passed. Chaplin's feature films began to incorporate psychology into his characters and the more anarchic gag structure of his first slapstick comedies was left behind in favour of more plot-centred stories. Certainly, at The Circus (1928), Chaplin was still at his peak, but the advent of sound caught him off guard. As if aware of his own usual belatedness, Benjamin decided to write about Mickey Mouse as soon as 1931, at the peak of the mouse's notoriety in Germany. Nevertheless, the initial enthusiasm of the intellectuals towards Walt Disney—which, in many respects, echoed that for Chaplin in his first years—soon waned. The release of Disney's first feature film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (dir. David Hand, 1937), showed the studio's move towards more naturalistic cartoons. Mickey Mouse soon left his early anarchistic tenor and began to be depicted as an adult. In the film Mickey's Steamroller (dir. David Hand, 1934), for example, his nephews become the naughty creatures he once was and Mickey has to direct all his energies to look after them.

Some authors have argued that Benjamin's theses on film were directed towards early cinema and, as such, cannot be applied to later films, especially sound film. Miriam Hansen, for example, argues that the aesthetic qualities that Benjamin ascribed to film were characteristic of a preclassical mode.