After years of waiting, George Lucas's museum opened to the public in Los Angeles on Tuesday, September 22, 2026. Its focus reaches well beyond Star Wars, bringing painting, illustration, comics and cinema together to explore how images tell stories. The building spans 27,870 square metres across five floors and cost an estimated 1,000 million dollars to build.
The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art occupies Exposition Park and resembles a futuristic spacecraft. Inside, more than 1,300 works fill over thirty galleries. EFE reports that the collection brings together artists and periods rarely found on the same exhibition route. CBS News reported that a private opening night took place the day before the museum opened to the public.
The museum's galleries are arranged around five subjects: comics, children's stories, fantasy, history and community, rather than following a standard march through art history. Classical painting appears alongside 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. Immersive displays use technology to recreate major sites and monuments. Visitors can see reproductions of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the Winged Bulls with Human Heads from the Palace of Sargon II held by the Louvre, and prehistoric cave paintings associated with the Altamira National Museum and Research Center in Spain.
Lucas's film archive gives the building its most recognisable draw. First established in 1983 at Skywalker Ranch in Marin County, California, the collection now spans 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, rather than as a separate attraction.
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, Haute Living reports. The complex is designed 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 to use inside the museum, but 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, bringing a contemporary edge to the historical reproductions and film artefacts.
NBC News and the Associated Press report that 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 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 with immersive technology, film screenings and a public reading space.
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 built a museum about how images tell stories, extending beyond a monument to his own franchises.
