I had a similar response, charcoal is still used to draw with and that is what, 100,000 years old by now?
The interesting challenge will be that there is a certain level of industry required to support the manufacture of base film stock, and making the chemicals to develop it. As the number of users goes down, the base cost of that development is spread across fewer users (higher per user cost) and at some point nobody is will willing to pay the full cost of supporting the industry. It is, by definition, the equivalent of the power curve in flight, higher prices lead to fewer users, which leads to higher prices, until you are down to 1 user paying for all the costs. Sometimes you can recover if new manufactures can come in at a lower level but without that you lose the ability to support many ways in which film was used.
Yes, the industry has been decimated. But what has also happened is that new, much smaller companies have sprung up to take the place of the old companies, buying out their manufacturing assets at pennies on the dollar.
Regardless, probably one of the coolest aspects of analog photography is the fact that you can make all your own materials (e.g. pinhole camera, albumen print, etc.) There are also photography companies that cater to the DIY/maker crowd. Photographers Formulary is a great place to get pretty much everything you need for film developing and printing. http://stores.photoformulary.com/
For the hardcore photography geeks, two good reference books.
This is what happened with ADOX, they went from being a large manufacturer to scaling down to a small team of experts. They still develop mind you, like ADOX CMS 20 has a resolvable resolution of about 500 Megapixels... http://www.adox.de/Photo/adox-films-2/cms-20-ii-adotech-ii/
The challenge is generally in making enough of the pre-cursors in enough quantity to make it cost effective.
So early technology, like charcoal :-), easy to make the pre-cursors. And for some silver halide films that is still true (19th century tech). But as you get to things that got their start in the 20th century and required a bunch of composite things to be in place in order to exist, those things may end up outside of the range of manufacturability (at a market making price).
It will be interesting to see the things that fall out from that.
The interesting challenge will be that there is a certain level of industry required to support the manufacture of base film stock, and making the chemicals to develop it. As the number of users goes down, the base cost of that development is spread across fewer users (higher per user cost) and at some point nobody is will willing to pay the full cost of supporting the industry. It is, by definition, the equivalent of the power curve in flight, higher prices lead to fewer users, which leads to higher prices, until you are down to 1 user paying for all the costs. Sometimes you can recover if new manufactures can come in at a lower level but without that you lose the ability to support many ways in which film was used.