George Lucas has opened a vast museum in Los Angeles. More than 1,300 works sit alongside cinema archives and immersive recreations of world masterpieces.
George Lucas's long-awaited museum opens to the public in Los Angeles on Tuesday, September 22, 2026. Its focus reaches well beyond Star Wars. The building brings painting, illustration, comics and cinema into one account of how images tell stories. It is also huge: 27,870 square metres across five floors, built at an estimated cost of 1,000 million dollars.
The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art occupies Exposition Park and looks like a futuristic spacecraft. Inside, more than 1,300 works fill over thirty galleries. According to EFE, the collection brings together artists and periods that rarely appear on the same exhibition route.
The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opened to the public on September 22, 2026, following a private opening night the day before.
The museum does not follow a standard march through art history. Its galleries are arranged around five subjects: comics, children's stories, fantasy, history and community. Classical painting appears beside Walt Disney illustrations, manga, Pikachu drawings, Robert Capa photography and the image known as 'La niña afgana'.
One of the most striking pairings is a powerful portrait of Barack Obama seen from behind. The collection also includes work by Artemisia Gentileschi, Vincent van Gogh, Beatrix Potter, George Bellows and Norman Rockwell. Other artists include Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Robert Colescott, Frank Frazetta, Ernie Barnes and Robert Crumb.
The museum also takes on works that cannot simply be moved into a gallery.
The building was designed by Ma Yansong’s MAD Architects in collaboration with Stantec. The museum forms part of an Exposition Park campus spanning roughly 11 to 13 acres, reinforcing its role as a major cultural anchor in Los Angeles.
Technology helps recreate major sites and monuments through immersive displays. Visitors can see reproductions of the ceiling of the Capilla Sixtina, the Winged Bulls with Human Heads from the Palace of Sargon II held by the Louvre, and prehistoric cave paintings associated with the Museo Nacional y Centro de Investigación de Altamira in Spain.
Lucas's film archive gives the building its most recognisable draw. The collection was first established in 1983 at Skywalker Ranch in Marin County, California. It now covers more than four decades of filmmaking connected with his creative vision. Objects on display include the Darth Vader costume, the R2-D2 robot and the C-3PO costume from Star Wars.
The archive also covers Indiana Jones. Props, artwork and objects from both series appear in a museum that treats film production as part of the wider history of visual storytelling, not as a separate attraction.
The complex is built to do more than house galleries. Its outdoor public space centres on a large oculus open to the sky. Two cinemas, each with capacity for almost 300 people, will screen films continuously. A library offers publications for all ages. Visitors can reserve books for use inside the museum, but they cannot borrow them for external use.
The fifth and final floor is dedicated to murals. It includes a gallery of works by Banksy that had not previously been seen. The display adds a contemporary edge to the historical reproductions and film artefacts.
According to NBC News and the Associated Press, George Lucas and Mellody Hobson developed the project as a long-term personal undertaking. Lucas called the museum a "temple to the people's art." ABC News reported that the pair presented narrative art as a fully legitimate field rather than a category beneath traditional fine art. Lucas also said the work had nearly broken his will.
Reports on the opening named Oprah Winfrey, Steven Spielberg, Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford and Gavin Newsom among the guests. The event drew attention from Hollywood and political figures before the museum opened to the public.
Local and national reports describe the museum as a new cultural anchor for Los Angeles and a major addition to the Exposition Park museum district. It brings together a large private collection, immersive technology, film screenings and a public reading space.
That mix gives the idea a clear physical shape. Visitors move from cave painting to comics, Renaissance painting to film props, and iconic photography to contemporary murals in the same building. George Lucas has opened more than a monument to his own franchises. He has built a museum about the way images tell stories.
