Film Photography's Revival Has a Price Problem Nobody Wants to Talk About

In October 2025, Eastman Kodak did something it hadn't done in over a decade: it started selling its own 35mm film directly to distributors. Kodacolor 100 and Kodacolor 200 — sub-brands of existing Kodak emulsions — marked the first time since the 2013 bankruptcy split that Eastman Kodak bypassed Kodak Alaris to put still photo film into the market under its own name. Two more stocks followed quietly. Kodak also launched the Snapic A1, a film point-and-shoot with double exposure capability, and it became one of the best-selling cameras of the year. The analog revival that skeptics dismissed as a hipster fad has real corporate money behind it now.

The numbers support the investment. Over 20 million rolls of photographic film were sold worldwide in 2023, a 15% increase over 2022. The global photographic film market is valued at roughly 0 million in 2026, growing at a modest but persistent rate. Kodak invested million to expand its Rochester coating facility, adding 3.5 million rolls of annual capacity. Fujifilm committed 0 million to its Ashigara factory for instant film production. Ilford launched an environmentally sustainable coating line using biodegradable solvents. More than 16 new film labs opened in North America in 2023 alone, backed by over million in private investment.

By every demand metric, film is thriving. By every cost metric, it's getting harder to sustain.

The Price Curve Is Going the Wrong Direction

Film prices have been climbing since the pandemic disrupted supply chains in 2020, and the trend has accelerated. After a brief 5-10% dip in 2024 that gave shooters a window to stock up, prices rose significantly in early 2025, with some stocks seeing double-digit increases. Fujifilm's price hikes have been particularly aggressive. Kodak Portra, the gold standard for portrait film, has increased in price repeatedly. Even Ilford's traditionally more stable pricing has crept upward.

The cost per roll tells only part of the story. Processing adds -15 per roll for C-41 color negative. Scanning adds another -20 depending on resolution. A single roll of 36 exposures — from purchase through processing and scanning — now costs to depending on the stock and the lab. Compare that to the effectively zero marginal cost per frame on digital, and the math becomes difficult to justify on anything other than aesthetic or philosophical grounds.

For the casual film shooter burning through a roll per week, the annual cost of film photography now approaches or exceeds the cost of a capable used digital camera. For professionals incorporating film into wedding or branding packages — a segment that's grown significantly, with 40% of wedding photographers now offering some film work — the margin pressure is real. You can't charge a client enough for film images to offset the per-frame cost unless the perceived value of "shot on film" carries a substantial premium. For now, it does. Whether that premium survives normalized pricing is an open question.

The analog revival is real, sustained, and culturally significant. It's also the only photography segment where the cost of making images keeps going up while the cost of the alternative keeps going down.

The Lab Infrastructure Is the Fragile Link

You can manufacture all the film you want. If there's nowhere to develop it, the product is useless. The global film lab ecosystem contracted dramatically between 2005 and 2020, and while the revival has sparked investment in new labs, the infrastructure remains thin compared to what existed when film was the dominant medium.

Mail-order labs have filled much of the gap, with companies building national and international businesses around film processing. But turnaround times of one to three weeks for mail-order development are a fundamental limitation that digital photographers would never accept. Local same-day or next-day processing — the kind that made film photography practical as a daily medium — exists in major cities but is sparse elsewhere. For a photographer in a mid-sized American city, the nearest film lab might be a two-hour drive or a five-day mail turnaround.

The revival has also created a skills gap. Experienced darkroom technicians and color lab operators largely left the industry during the digital transition. New labs are staffed by enthusiastic but often self-taught operators, and processing consistency varies. The quality control systems that Kodak and Fujifilm built into their professional lab networks — the control strips, the densitometer readings, the chemical replenishment schedules — represented decades of institutional knowledge that didn't transfer to the next generation. Some new labs are excellent. Others are learning on their customers' irreplaceable exposures.

Kodak's Direct Distribution Play

Eastman Kodak's decision to sell film directly — bypassing the Kodak Alaris distribution agreement that has governed retail film sales since 2013 — is the most strategically significant development in the film market in years. The stated rationale is price stabilization: by controlling distribution, Kodak can theoretically moderate the price swings that have frustrated both retailers and consumers.

But the move also reflects a company that sees long-term value in analog photography and wants to capture more of the margin. Eastman Kodak manufactures the film. Kodak Alaris distributes it. Every roll that Eastman Kodak sells directly is a roll where the full margin stays in Rochester. If the Kodacolor launch proves successful, expect more stocks to follow — and expect the relationship between the two Kodak entities to become increasingly complicated.

The Ceiling Nobody Mentions

Film photography peaked at 960 million rolls in 2003. Today's market is roughly 2% of that. The revival is real, but it's a revival within a niche — roughly 20 million rolls annually, served by a manufacturing base that could produce considerably more if demand justified it. The constraint isn't production capacity. It's the number of people willing to pay current prices and tolerate current infrastructure limitations.

The cultural drivers remain strong. Gen Z's appetite for analog, the #FilmIsNotDead movement's billions of social media impressions, the aesthetic qualities that digital processing still can't perfectly replicate — these forces aren't going away. But cultural enthusiasm runs into economic reality at a specific price point, and every price increase tests that boundary.

The most likely future for film photography is the one it's already becoming: a premium creative medium with dedicated practitioners, healthy but modest market growth, and pricing that positions it as an intentional choice rather than a default one. The era of film as everyday photography is over. The era of film as a deliberate artistic practice is flourishing. Whether the economics can sustain the enthusiasm is the question that will define the next five years of analog photography.