New LA Museum Showcases Narrative Art

In 1977, George Lucas released a small science fiction film that he thought might be his last commercial movie. It became Star Wars, the highest-grossing film in history at that time. That success reshaped his career and, in a way, led directly to the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles. The museum, a massive, swooping structure in Exposition Park, is Lucas’s attempt to understand why certain stories stick.

The filmmaker’s path to this moment was anything but straightforward. Before Star Wars, Lucas had made THX 1138, a dystopian fantasy that flopped. His follow-up, American Graffiti, a nostalgic portrait of Northern California teenagers, was an unexpected box office success. That gave him the freedom to try something risky.

As Lucas saw it, his third movie had a good chance of flopping again. So he went all in on an experiment—a soundstage movie that might matter only to him. If it failed, Lucas figured, he could go home and keep making small, plotless ‘pure cinema’ movies, which he genuinely loved.

In college anthropology classes, Lucas had learned something that stuck with him: certain myths show up again and again across different cultures, just in different forms. He wondered what would happen if you took those stories and boiled them down into a single movie. Lucas was a child of the postwar Bay Area, living through the social upheavals of the 1960s, torn between a drive against authority and a longing for the stories that used to hold society together.

For his movie, Lucas distilled tales of good and evil on battlefields, of strangers meeting in taverns and setting out on journeys, of religious life forces. He wrote about a fatherless young man raised by a kind farmer, dreaming of a world beyond his small province. And because these were myths from nowhere and everywhere, he set the movie in a universal territory: outer space.

The project was high-concept.

Lucas fleshed out the details—imagining space creatures, inventing names—and then broke box office rules. The first 17 minutes of the film centered on two expressionless, slow-moving robots. Characters had dialogue in beeps or growls. Many of them looked like they dressed like the Bee Gees. When people first saw the movie, some had hopes for it. Nobody foresaw what was coming.

Within a year, the movie had become the highest-grossing film in history worldwide. That scale of success startled Lucas and forced him to rethink his path. He never lost his love for what he called ‘nonstory, noncharacter movies,’ but he also never went back to making pure cinema.

A lifelong puzzle about stories

What the space-myth project showed Lucas, he later said, was something strange and interesting: how popular stories could organize experience across time and culture. He saw how strong that power could be, if you harnessed it. Over the decades that followed, he expanded his own studio and made more movies, some enormously successful. Lucas sold his company, Lucasfilm, to Disney in 2012 for over $4 billion.

But the mystery of how stories touch different people and shape society never stopped being his main focus. It became, in his own words, the project of his life. That project is now expressed in the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, a museum dedicated not just to his movies but to the entire concept of visual storytelling.

What the museum actually holds

The museum’s collection is vast and deliberately odd. It includes over 100,000 objects: paintings, comic books, film props, digital art, and illustrations. There are works by Norman Rockwell alongside concept art from the franchise. There are Japanese woodblocks next to ancient Egyptian funerary art. The curators argue that all of these objects do the same thing: they tell a story.

One gallery shows the evolution of a single character—Darth Vader—from Lucas’s early sketches to the final costume. Another gallery displays World War I propaganda posters next to Marvel comic book covers. The museum does not separate ‘high art’ from ‘low art.’ It treats a Rockwell painting and an action figure from the franchise as equally worthy of study, as long as they tell a story.

The building itself is designed to feel otherworldly. It rises from Exposition Park like a spaceship that landed wrong—sleek, curved, and silver. The architect, Ma Yansong, is Chinese and known for organic, flowing forms. He said he wanted the museum to look like it had ‘grown out of the earth.’ It cost an estimated $1 billion to build.

Not everyone is convinced the museum will work. Some art critics have questioned whether a billionaire’s vanity project can really be a serious museum. The collection is deeply tied to Lucas’s personal taste, which leans heavily toward illustration and popular cinema. It does not cover many other forms of narrative, like literature or theater. The institution is, in many ways, a monument to one man’s obsession.

Lucas himself seems fine with that.

‘I’ve been thinking about this for 40 years,’ he told reporters. ‘I don’t expect everyone to get it.’

The museum opened to the public in February 2025.

Early reviews have been mixed but generally positive. Visitors describe it as overwhelming, exhausting, and surprising. There are no clear paths through the galleries; the experience is designed to feel like wandering through someone’s brain. One critic called it ‘a beautiful, incoherent mess.’ Another said it was ‘the most honest museum in America.’