Introduction. The relevance of the work is dictated by the role of creative industries as drivers of territorial development, especially in the context of the «creative reindustrialization» of such macro-regions as the Ural Federal Okrug. Despite its significant potential, the district's film industry is characterized by high spatial heterogeneity and a lack of systematic economic analysis at the city level. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the fact that for the first time a comprehensive spatial and economic analysis of the district's film industry at the city level has been proposed: survival rates have been calculated and a financial ranking of leaders has been conducted, empirically confirming the hyper-concentration of creative capital and resources. The purpose of the research is a comprehensive spatial and economic analysis of the current state of the film industry in the Ural Federal Okrug basing on a continuous sample of cities.
Materials and methods. The empirical basis of the study was made up of microdata on the financial and economic activities of 507 organizations and individual entrepreneurs registered in six subjects of the Ural Federal Okrug in the period from 1991 to 2026. Information was collected through aggregators that accumulate data from the Federal Tax Service and Rosstat on specialized types of activities (OKVED 59.11–59.14). The methodology is based on a combination of spatial analysis (geocoding of legal addresses) and financial and economic profiling. The paper uses methods of descriptive statistics, calculation of survival rates and multidimensional ranking of market leaders in terms of revenue, profit and capital.
Results and conclusions. It has been established that the Ural Federal Okrug film industry market (507 organizations) is characterized by an extremely tough competitive environment: the liquidation rate reaches 48%. The total revenue exceeds 5.4 billion rubles and is unevenly distributed: hyper-concentration of creative capital has been revealed in three cores – Yekaterinburg, Chelyabinsk and Tyumen, accumulating more than 85% of the district's revenue. The Sverdlovsk Region is the leader in the number of organizations (45% of the market), while the Chelyabinsk Region is the leader in net profit due to the monopolization of the film screening segment. The highest business sustainability was recorded in the Tyumen Region (60.9%), which confirms the effectiveness of regional support programs. A special result was the allocation of the «northern model» (KhMAO): niche B2B production studios demonstrate profitability of over 40%.
Discussion. The results confirm the theory of the concentration of creative resources in the largest agglomerations and the risk of degradation of peripheral territories. Basing on empirical data, two stable regional models have been identified: the Tyumen incubator, which ensures record business survival, and the Northern Way (Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug, Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug), where the film industry is transformed into a high-tech B2B service for raw materials corporations. The dominance of the screening segment over film production creates the risk of the macro-region becoming a «consumer colony» with a shortage of local symbolic capital. The practical significance of the work is to substantiate the need for a transition from the transit economy of distribution to the creation of cluster mechanisms for a full production cycle.