Lucas Museum of Narrative Art Opens Its $1 Billion Bet

George Lucas and Mellody Hobson toasted their estimated $1 billion Lucas Museum of Narrative Art on Saturday in Exposition Park. The public can walk in on Tuesday, September 22.

The guest list did what Hollywood guest lists do. The wager underneath it is harder: whether comics, illustration, murals and movie crafts can hold a 300,000-square-foot museum once the famous people go home.

Saturday Night Was Never the Test

On a warm Saturday in South Los Angeles, the gray carpet filled with Oprah Winfrey, Leonardo DiCaprio, Kim Kardashian, Robert De Niro, Katy Perry, Justin Trudeau and Gov. Gavin Newsom. Al Roker looked up at Ma Yansong’s building and called it “a futuristic kidney bean with a lawn on top, which is amazing.”

French artist Prune Nourry brought R2-D2. Bella Poarch wore a curved outfit that echoed the museum’s walls. Katy Perry said she had dressed like the building. The museum’s own recap of the night framed it as a room of storytellers. The talk around that recap was mostly who else was in the frame.

A room full of incredible storytellers gathered to celebrate narrative art. The Lucas Museum's opening night was truly unforgettable. pic.twitter.com/LEW6jf7fEL

— Lucas Museum of Narrative Art (@lucasmuseum) September 20, 2026

Opening night was co-chaired by Julie Bell, Tom Cruise, Greta Gerwig, Jensen Huang, JR, Steven Spielberg, Guillermo del Toro and Pharrell Williams. That is a useful crowd if you are trying to make illustration sound like a serious museum category. It is a weak crowd if you are trying to find out whether a $25 ticket holder from Vermont Avenue will come back in November.

Ryan Linkof, a curator, has said the place was built for “fanatics and enthusiasts,” including the comic-book art that creates a fan base. Saturday was not that audience. It was the send-off.

The Presidio, the Lakefront and a Parking Lot

Lucas first tried to plant a museum in 2010 at the Presidio in San Francisco, and he pledged about $700 million to build and endow it. In February 2014 the Presidio Trust turned the design down. Chicago then offered lakefront land on a 99-year lease for $10. Friends of the Parks sued, arguing the site was public parkland. In June 2016 Lucas walked away, saying no one benefited from “unending litigation to protect a parking lot.”

Los Angeles took the project in 2017. Groundbreaking in Exposition Park came in 2018, across the street from Lucas’s old school, USC. The first opening target was 2021. Pandemic shutdowns and supply delays pushed it to 2026. At a September 2 press preview Lucas said, “I’m used to doing the impossible. This one almost broke my will.”

THE PATH TO EXPOSITION PARK

1. 2010: Lucas proposes a privately funded popular-art museum at the Presidio.
2. February 2014: The Presidio Trust rejects the design; the $700 million pledge is not enough to hold the site.
3. 2014 to 2016: Chicago’s lakefront plan stalls in federal court after Friends of the Parks sues.
4. June 2016: Lucas drops Chicago and looks west again.
5. 2017 and 2018: The board picks Exposition Park; construction starts on a former asphalt lot.
6. 2021: The first public opening date slips, then slips again.
7. September 19, 2026: Opening night in the finished building.
8. September 22, 2026: Doors open to ticketed visitors.

Hobson later summed up the civic part in one dry line: they had not realized how hard it would be to give a city a museum.

What the Galleries Hang

The museum calls itself a home for visual storytelling, from cave paintings to comics and film. CEO Tracey Bates has described a starting collection of more than 40,000 works. Opening installations put more than 1,300 works on view across 30-plus galleries and more than 100,000 square feet of exhibition space.

Hobson has said the Star Wars material is about 7 percent of what visitors will see. Lucas has been repeating a related warning: this is a narrative art museum, and the franchise is there because it pulls a certain crowd through the door. The first cinema show, Star Wars in Motion, still gives that crowd what it came for, including Luke Skywalker’s landspeeder from A New Hope (1977) and the first physical build of General Grievous’s wheel bike from Revenge of the Sith (2005).

WHAT OPENS WITH THE BUILDING

• Heroes, myths, the sacred: The first-floor history gallery mixes collection objects with museum-made copies of immovable works, including scans tied to the Sistine Chapel ceiling, Altamira cave paintings and the Aztec Sun Stone.
• Illustration rooms: Separate galleries honor Norman Rockwell, N.C. Wyeth, Jessie Willcox Smith, Maxfield Parrish, Frank Frazetta and Thomas Hart Benton.
• Comics and print: George Herriman, Charles Schulz, Jim Lee, Frank Miller, Robert Crumb and others share space with manga and graphic novels.
• Painting and photography: The hang includes Artemisia Gentileschi, Frida Kahlo, Jacob Lawrence, Gordon Parks, Robert Capa and Robert Colescott.
• Murals: Judith F. Baca’s Great Wall of Los Angeles archive sits with Diego Rivera, JR and Banksy works taken from the studio.
• Two drop-in theaters: The Robert Flaherty Theater and the Slavko Vorkapich Theater run films from a few minutes to about 90 minutes, no extra ticket.

The free research library is the quiet half of the same bet. It holds more than 30,000 comic books, about 3,000 art books given by Steve Martin and Ann Martin, and more than 2,900 volumes from mythologist Joseph Campbell, whose Hero with a Thousand Faces shaped how Lucas built Star Wars. Those shelves are open without a gallery ticket.

A Building With No Straight Lines

Ma Yansong of MAD, working with Stantec, designed a five-story form with no straight outer line, clad in more than 1,200 curved fiberglass-reinforced polymer panels. He has compared the mass to a cloud, a dream and a tree canopy. The building lifts off the ground on a 185-foot arched steel span, leaving a shaded plaza and a four-story oculus that looks from pavement to sky.

THE PHYSICAL WAGER

• Building: 300,000 square feet, with galleries on levels 1, 4 and 5.
• Campus: 13 acres of new park on a former parking lot, with more than 300 new trees.
• Classrooms: 10 studio and classroom spaces, plus a horseshoe-shaped library.
• Outside: 10 monumental sculptures, from Fernando Botero’s Maternity to bronzes of Padmé, Leia, Yoda and Grogu, Rosie the Riveter and Eadweard Muybridge.

The gardens are by Mia Lehrer of Studio-MLA, and they are open from 8 a.m. to sunset with no ticket. Paths, a meadow, an amphitheater, a hanging garden and a waterfall fountain sit on landforms meant to recall California foothills and canyons. Skywalker Grill, designed by Rockwell Group and run by Rhubarb Hospitality Collection, stays open after the galleries close and does not require museum admission.

Angelenos have compared the silhouette to a sneaker. From the carpet it reads as a landed craft. Either way, the architecture is doing collection work: it tells visitors they are not walking into a white-cube temple of painting.

Free for Zip 90037, $25 at the Door

Timed-entry tickets are required for every gallery visitor, including children and anyone with a free pass. There is no walk-up line for the art. Adult tickets cost $25, in line with other large L.A. museums, and general admission covers galleries, exhibitions and both theaters.

WHO PAYS AND WHO DOES NOT

The LM37 pass is the local clause in the bet. Residents of the museum’s own ZIP can reserve free tickets for themselves and one guest, with a block of opening inventory set aside for them. Neighborhood partners, business owners and civic leaders got a preview on Sunday, September 13. Members went through September 5 to 11.

Bates has said the staff spent eight years building in South Central and Exposition Park, and that the pass is how neighbors are asked to make the museum part of ordinary life. The park, shop, café, restaurant and library do not need a ticket. Costumes are allowed; lightsabers and big props go to the checkroom. After opening day, the regular calendar lists Tuesday as closed.

Hobson Told Him to Give the Art Away

Hobson is not a plus-one on the donor wall. She is co-CEO of Ariel Investments, a former chair of Starbucks, and a director of JPMorgan Chase. She is also a Chicago native, which is why the lakefront offer in 2014 looked like a family landing as much as a civic one.

When the delays stacked up, she floated a smaller ending. Give the art to another museum, she told him, and stop. Lucas answered that he was building this museum. She has described that as the most intense version of him she had seen, and as the moment the argument ended.

If your husband or spouse comes home and says they want to build a museum, I suggest your response is a hard no.

Mellody Hobson, co-founder, opening night

She also told the room that if critics call narrative art a popcorn movie instead of an art film, her family likes popcorn movies. Lucas, in the museum’s opening statement, put the same idea in collector language: the artists “didn’t just create images, they connected our modern imaginations with our ancient emotions,” and “they deserve to be in a museum.”

That is the whole wager in two voices. One is a financier who almost cashed out of a money pit. The other is a director who would not let a city, a lawsuit or a pandemic end the picture.

The Public Gets In on Tuesday

Member days are over. The neighborhood preview is over. Saturday’s party is over. The remaining date is Tuesday, September 22, at One Lucas Plaza, 3800 South Vermont Avenue, beside the Coliseum and the Natural History Museum.

Regular hours after that run 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday, Wednesday and Thursday; 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Friday; 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Saturday; and 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday, with last entry 45 minutes before close. The museum is closed Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s Day. Tickets already on sale run through February 2027.

The park around the building opens at 8 a.m. and stays free until sunset. The galleries wait for a timed ticket.