Hey!
Unlikely, probably not in my lifetime.
But it will be with less selection, harder to find stuff and likely will cost more also. And this already happening lately. With color print film the big problem I think will be finding a good local lab to get prints.
Take care,
Buddy
Film imaging is a chemical process, and a simple one at that. There is nothing stopping anyone from coating a plate or film, exposing it via a simple camera (can be no more than a box with a small hole in it) and running it through a few chemical baths easily made up at home. Making the film stock is not complex either ... it's the same thing a capacitor fab does every day, with a few minor details the only difference. The final image can also be printed on paper you could easily make at home, if you wanted. The list of appropriate chemicals is long ... you can choose from a number of formulas so substitution is no problem ... and not exotic by any means. You are right ... it is essentially impossible to kill conventional photography.
Photo labs are just fairly simple automated versions of the process. Instead of home processing, they do it the same way movie stock is processed. The chemicals are easily made up (if you can't buy them from the usual suppliers) and there is nothing beyond demand that would stop someone from operating a high volume lab.
Kodachrome was different. It is not a simple film stock, and it's not a simple processing lab that develops that stock. Kodachrome is not even colour film ... it's black and white film in three layers, and each layer is converted to one of three individual colours in a complex process. As a dye-based image, Kodachrome was essentially grain-free; certainly in comparison to the alternatives, anyway. 'Grain" in photography can be (crudely) compared to a pixel in a digital image. No grain = practically unlimited pixels. That is a gross oversimplification, but it does show the essence of why that particular film was so prized.
Kodachrome is dead ... long live Kodachrome. Film photography, however, cannot die.
I was sad and a little miffed to learn that the last Kodachrome lab was closing, and it hit the news the very day it ended. Even a month of notice would have helped, but apparently the chemicals needed are no longer available, and the lab's stock was at an end. So, I understand why it happened the way it did.
I always bought my Kodachrome with the prepaid processing from Kodak. They stopped processing their own film years ago, meaning I would now have to pay for processing I'd already paid for at a private lab. So, I hadn't sent in the last few rolls I had around. With a little notice, I would have.
A few years ago I sold stock photos. Prior to about 1990 no magazine would accept an image if it were not shot on Kodachrome. Digital printing and later, digital imaging changed that. The quality of digital printing was not the same as the older methods, and slowly a poorer quality became acceptable, and magazines began accepting conventional slide film as well as 'Chrome, because you couldn't keep a Kodachrome's inherent quality anyway. Digital printing and imaging has improved, but consumers are now used to low-quality images now so it's not always exploited to the maximum.
