On Jim Continenza's first day as Eastman Kodak's executive chairman in 2019, the company was in the process of shutting down its acetate factory, the facility that produces the base material for motion picture film. Then the phone rang. Christopher Nolan, the director behind "Inception" and "Oppenheimer," was on the line with a blunt request: keep the machines running.
That call changed the trajectory of a company most of Wall Street had already written off. CNBC reported on Continenza's account of the turnaround, which now spans seven years of debt reduction, leadership overhaul, and a bet on film that Hollywood has rewarded with Oscar gold.
Multiple 2026 Academy Award-winning movies, including "One Battle After Another" and "Sinners", were shot on Kodak film. The stock has nearly doubled over the past year. And a company that declared bankruptcy in 2012, hit an all-time low of $1.55 per share in March 2020, and warned last year about its own ability to survive as a going concern now posts rising quarterly profits.
It is a story worth telling, not because Kodak is out of the woods, but because it illustrates what happens when a legacy American brand stops chasing trends and starts doing the hard, unglamorous work of fixing its balance sheet and making things people actually want.
Continenza described himself as a "turnaround specialist" who previously held leadership roles at AT&T and Lucent. He said he chose Kodak as the final company he would try to revive. On day one, he was already overseeing the shutdown of the acetate operation when Nolan intervened.
Continenza recalled Nolan's words:
"Do not turn this off. Please take a look."
Continenza said he listened, and then looked closer. He told CNBC:
"He was right. I started looking at it because I shoot 35 millimeter [film], and I'm like, 'Why would one of the greatest directors of all time even have this conversation?'"
That question led Continenza to keep the factory open and eventually invest in expanding Kodak's film capacity. The decision looked contrarian at the time. The onset of digital technology had gutted Kodak's core business years earlier. Melius Research analyst Ben Reitzes wrote in a note last year that Kodak's own management had once insisted film would coexist with digital cameras.
"At the time, Kodak management told us that film would co-exist with digital cameras and more photos would be taken, and more would need to be printed by Kodak."
That prediction proved badly wrong. Kodak declared bankruptcy in 2012 and reemerged a year later as a smaller company, pivoting to commercial printing. Its stock sank more than 35% in 2014. By the time Continenza arrived, the brand was a cautionary tale about corporate failure to adapt.
Continenza's approach was not glamorous. He said he changed about 90% of the company's leadership. He said Kodak paid off more than $400 million in debt and refinanced the company three times. The result, he told CNBC, was a rightsized balance sheet and a reduced annual interest expense of roughly $40 million.
At a time when American manufacturing brands face plant closures and layoffs, Continenza framed his mission in blunt terms:
"Here's what our goal is: We're going to create jobs for the next generation. Make no mistake, we're going to fix this company and put it on a stable foundation and put building blocks to grow all the systems."
He described the company's spending philosophy as restrained. "We didn't put in what we need, we put in what we want, and that's a difference," Continenza said. That distinction, between a company burning cash on ambitions it cannot fund and one that invests only in what it can sustain, matters more than most analysts give it credit for.
The turnaround has not been smooth. Last year, Kodak cautioned that its financial conditions "raise substantial doubt about Kodak's ability to continue as a going concern." In the same quarter, the company posted a 12% decrease in gross profit. Wall Street reacted predictably: investors drove the stock from roughly $7 per share to just over $5 in a single session.
A Kodak spokesperson said the going concern language had to be included because the company did not have enough available liquidity to pay off its debt due within 12 months. Kodak described the disclosure as a required technical report and said it was confident it would pay off a significant portion of that loan before it became due by terminating its pension plan.
Continenza acknowledged the communication could have been better. "We could have done a better job on it, because to us, it wasn't as dire straits, it was more of a GAAP accounting coincidence by dates," he said, calling it a "timing issue" for the loans.
Whether investors found that reassuring is another matter. Last August, Kodak reported roughly $155 million in cash against nearly $600 million in loans. Those are not the numbers of a company with wide margins for error. But the trend line has shifted. Last month, Kodak's fourth-quarter gross profit reached $67 million, a 31% increase from the year prior.
The broader landscape of iconic American companies making large domestic commitments, such as GE Aerospace's billion-dollar investment across 17 states, provides context for what Kodak is attempting on a smaller scale: proving that an old brand can still build things in America and turn a profit doing it.
The film business, the one Nolan's phone call preserved, has become a genuine bright spot. Continenza said the look of photos and videos shot on film captures something that "penetrates your heart and soul." That is a subjective claim. But the market has backed it up: multiple Oscar-winning productions now shoot on Kodak stock, and the company has invested in expanding capacity to meet rising demand.
Kodak shifted its primary focus after bankruptcy to commercial printing and what it calls advanced materials and chemicals. Film is not the whole company. But it is the part that carries the brand's emotional weight, and in a media environment saturated with digital content, that weight has commercial value.
Other legacy manufacturers have faced the opposite trajectory. Maine's Lincoln Logs factory faces closure with production potentially shifting overseas, a reminder that not every iconic American brand finds a second act.
Continenza described his investor strategy in characteristically direct terms. "First thing I always do is go out and get people who want to hold the company and buy them out, and that's what we did," he said. He replaced short-term holders with investors aligned with a longer horizon.
"I got a board and investors who love what we're doing, we keep them informed, and they help guide us."
He called the relationship "transparent." And he made clear he is not managing to a stock ticker. "I don't look at our stock price. I don't care. I couldn't tell you what it is today. I'm a long-term investor," Continenza said.
Over the past year, that stock has shot up nearly 100%. Continenza framed the trajectory as intentional. "We're doing our job. The stock's not supposed to spike, it's supposed to crawl, because that's how we grow," he said.
That philosophy, slow, steady, built on operations rather than hype, runs against the grain of a market culture addicted to momentum trades and meme stocks. It is also the kind of approach that built American industry in the first place. Companies like Toyota, which recently committed $1 billion to expand its Kentucky and Indiana factories, understand the value of patient capital invested in real production.
Kodak's turnaround story is real, but it is not finished. The company still carries substantial debt. The going concern warning, however technical, reflected genuine liquidity constraints. The pension plan termination that Kodak said would help pay down loans raises its own questions about obligations to retirees.
Continenza acknowledged the scale of the challenge. "[It's] a 130-plus year old company, right? You can imagine what's in the attic," he said. Seven years of restructuring have cleaned out some of that attic. Whether the foundation underneath is strong enough to support real, durable growth remains an open question.
He was also candid about the limits of his ambition. "We don't need to be a $5 billion or $20 billion or $80 billion company," Continenza said. "We're a billion-dollar global company, but one thing we have going for us is our brand recognition. And make no mistake, around the globe, it is endeared and loved, and it'll continue to be."
Continenza said he has spent seven years doing the work. "You've got to put the work in and the long-term investments, and you've got to be methodical, but you've got to fix your operations," he said. He also acknowledged the risk of overreach, saying he did not want to "screw it up."
In an economy where major manufacturers are reshuffling production across the country, Kodak's story stands as a small but telling case study. A company that nearly vanished chose to make things again, real, physical products, and found that the market still has a place for brands that do honest work instead of chasing the next disruption.
Sometimes the smartest business strategy is also the oldest: fix what's broken, make what people want, and don't spend money you don't have. Washington could learn something.