George Lucas' $1 Billion Museum Opens in Los Angeles

George Lucas and Mellody Hobson are opening the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles after a project that took roughly 17 years to reach the public. The museum, widely reported as a $1 billion undertaking, opens Sept. 22 in Exposition Park with a 300,000-square-foot building that looks almost as unusual as some of the stories inside it.

The building is meant to be part of the attraction

CBS News described the museum as a 300,000-square-foot structure with more than 1,300 works on display for the opening. Architect Ma Yansong designed the sweeping, curved building, which sits within a landscaped campus close to the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and USC.

The museum’s own opening announcement says the project includes 100,000 square feet of gallery space, film screenings, a research library, a restaurant and a 13-acre surrounding landscape. The scale makes the museum more than a collection placed inside a conventional box.

It is not primarily a Star Wars museum

Lucas’ name guarantees that many visitors will arrive expecting lightsabers, spacecraft and other pieces of the franchise that made him famous. But Hobson told CBS News that Star Wars accounts for only about 7% of the art in the museum.

The Associated Press reported that the collection ranges from film material and comics to works by Frida Kahlo, Banksy, Norman Rockwell and other artists. That mix is central to Lucas’ concept of “narrative art,” which places illustration, popular imagery and fine art inside the same storytelling framework.

The project survived two rejected cities

The Los Angeles opening comes after earlier plans in San Francisco and Chicago failed to move forward. The museum ultimately landed in Exposition Park, where construction began years before the public opening date was set.

That history gives the opening an unusually long runway. What started as Lucas’ effort to create a permanent home for his collection has become a major new Los Angeles cultural site, built around the argument that the pictures people grow up with can belong beside more traditional museum art. On Sept. 22, visitors finally get to see whether that idea works at full scale.

References: Illustrating myths: The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opens | 5 must-see things at George Lucas’s new Museum of Narrative Art as it opens to the public | Lucas Museum of Narrative Art Opens to the Public on September 22, 2026