California's Newest Major Museum Is Opening Soon In Los Angeles With Unique Exhibits

Visitors to Los Angeles will soon discover what it's like to wander through the cinematic archives of "Star Wars" and Indiana Jones creator George Lucas. It won't be in a galaxy far, far away when the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opens to the public on September 22, 2026. Just purchase a $25 timed-entry ticket online before heading to One Lucas Plaza in South LA for a tour of the archives. They were the starting point for this museum of storytelling through images, back when Lucas donated his vast personal collection of art and movie props in 2013 (following the $4 billion sale of his entertainment company, Lucasfilm, to Disney). Not all 40,000 pieces are going on display, but you'll see over 1,200 of them across 30 galleries in the museum's first wave of exhibits.

Co-founded by Lucas and his wife, Mellody Hobson — the former chair of Starbucks and DreamWorks Animation — the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art is opening just in time for the 50th anniversary of "Star Wars" in 2027. However, unlike Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge at Disneyland, or Rancho Obi-Wan and its massive "Star Wars" museum collection near San Francisco, this facility isn't a shrine to one film franchise. The museum's board of directors includes filmmakers Steven Spielberg and Guillermo del Toro, but its focus goes well beyond movies.

What you'll find inside the $1-billion museum, which was more expensive to build than a presidential library, is as much a creative hodgepodge as Meow Wolf, another immersive art attraction opening soon in Los Angeles. Spread out across 100,000 square feet on a 13-acre campus in Exposition Park, it's "a temple to the people's art," as Lucas called it down in San Diego at Comic-Con 2025 (via The Associated Press). That means visual art across many different mediums: not just fine art, but also street art like Banksy's murals.

Indiana Jones fans should remember that warehouse of historical artifacts at the end of "Raiders of the Lost Ark." Just imagine it was full of Americana and pop culture treasures, ready to be unboxed and put on display in LA. One exhibit at the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art is dedicated to Norman Rockwell paintings. You'll see other, stylistically similar works in the museum, like John Philip Falter's "Lunch Counter" (1946) and Richard Sargent's "Singing Praise" (1959). These both graced the cover of the Saturday Evening Post as George Lucas was growing up in Modesto, California.

A Frida Kahlo self-portrait is on display in the museum, along with Dorothea Lange's famous Great Depression photograph, "Migrant Mother." There's a manga exhibit, and one devoted to comics, where Jim Lee's Wonder Woman shares space with Jack Kirby's original cover art for Captain America #109. The exhibit covering children's stories features a "Where the Wild Things Are" illustration by Maurice Sendak and an authentic Cowardly Lion costume from "The Wizard of Oz." Two on-site theaters screen documentaries and short films, including Looney Tunes shorts. And of course, you'll see some of Ralph McQuarrie's early "Star Wars" concept art in the cinema gallery.

Don't expect to come away with a deeper understanding of the cultural context for any given piece at the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. In a bid to let visitors and artwork tell their own story (often in a single frame, as Mellody Hobson puts it, via The Guardian), the museum eschews labels with explanatory text beside each work. You won't learn much beyond the title and artist's name, and in fact, the museum laid off much of its educational staff prior to opening. As such, despite its focus on visual storytelling, some advance reviews have likened it to a museum with no narrative, or one that's more autodidactic than didactic.

With its original chief curator also departing and George Lucas reasserting control over his art collection, the real narrative at his LA museum might be his tastes and tendency to self-mythologize in mass media. In that respect, perhaps the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art is more like Xanadu — the Florida mansion in "Citizen Kane," filled with a tycoon's relics — than the "Raiders of the Lost Ark" warehouse. This is a destination where visitors can essentially browse a billionaire's Pinterest profile in person. The museum's space-age design even makes it look like a "Star Wars" ship, bound for Planet Xanadu.

Roaming through the sculpture garden outside the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, you'll see a random moment from the "Star Wars" prequel, "Attack of the Clones," in place of Kane's cherished sled, Rosebud. It's the moment where Natalie Portman's character, Padmé, fights off a toothy creature called the nexu. Of all the "Star Wars" scenes that could have been cast in bronze, this one is arguably less recognizable than the garden's "Return of the Jedi" scene, where Princess Leia, in her infamous slave bikini, choke-chains Jabba the Hutt. Yet it's an on-brand flourish for a museum that makes no distinction between high and low art (or good and bad movies, some might say).

In merging his private art collection with a public-facing initiative, Lucas may have delivered what The Hollywood Reporter calls "a museum as Megalopolis." That's a reference to the work of his onetime American Zoetrope partner, Francis Ford Coppola (the director of "The Godfather" and inspiration for Han Solo in "Star Wars"), whose self-financed film, "Megalopolis," was a critical and commercial disappointment in 2024. Like that movie, the museum blurs the line between a passion project and vanity project. Time will tell whether its fate as a travel destination fares any better than Disney's short-lived "Star Wars" luxury hotel in Florida.