Los Angeles is about to get one of its most talked-about cultural openings. The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, built around George Lucas's personal collection, opens to the public on September 22, 2026 at One Lucas Plaza in Exposition Park, South LA. Timed-entry tickets cost $25, bought online in advance.
The origins go back to 2013, when Lucas — flush from selling Lucasfilm to Disney for $4 billion — donated his vast trove of art and movie props to the project he co-founded with his wife, Mellody Hobson, the former chair of Starbucks and DreamWorks Animation. Not everything will be shown at once: over 1,200 pieces from a collection of roughly 40,000 will fill 30 galleries across 100,000 square feet, on a 13-acre campus. Timing is apt — Star Wars turns 50 in 2027.
This is not a Star Wars shrine. The board includes Steven Spielberg and Guillermo del Toro, and the collection deliberately spans high and low storytelling. You'll find Norman Rockwell paintings beside Saturday Evening Post-era covers like John Philip Falter's "Lunch Counter" (1946), a Frida Kahlo self-portrait, Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother," a manga and comics gallery with Jack Kirby's original Captain America #109 cover art, and Banksy murals. There's a children's literature wing with a Maurice Sendak "Where the Wild Things Are" illustration and the actual Cowardly Lion costume from "The Wizard of Oz." Film fans get two on-site theaters screening shorts and documentaries, plus Ralph McQuarrie's early Star Wars concept art. Outside, a sculpture garden includes bronzes of scenes from "Attack of the Clones" and Leia's encounter with Jabba the Hutt.
One quirk divides critics: the museum largely skips explanatory wall text. Visitors get little more than a title and artist's name — a deliberate choice, in Hobson's telling, to let each image tell its own story. The museum laid off much of its educational staff before opening, and some advance reviews have been skeptical, likening the result to a billionaire's passion project or a real-life Xanadu from "Citizen Kane."
Still, for travellers it's an easy sell: a single $25 ticket buys a genuinely one-of-a-kind sweep through American illustration, photography, comics, cinema and street art, with the space-age building itself looking like a Star Wars vessel landed in Exposition Park. Pair it with the neighbouring California Science Center and the Coliseum for a solid South LA day out. Whether it lands as visionary or vanity, you'll want to see it for yourself — and early visits will beat the crowds that arrive with the Star Wars anniversary in 2027.