Exterior view of the curved, sculptural Lucas Museum of Narrative Art building in Los Angeles

George Lucas’s $1 Billion Museum of Narrative Art Just Threw a Star-Studded Opening Gala, and Oprah Narrated a Drone Show

September 20, 2026 Noah

George Lucas has already thrown open the doors to his long-delayed passion project, at least for one very starry night. The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art held its opening gala in Los Angeles’s Exposition Park on September 19, turning out one of the biggest celebrity gatherings Hollywood has seen this year ahead of the museum’s public opening on September 22. It caps off a saga that took 16 years, three different cities, and at least $1 billion of Lucas’s own money to finish.

A Party Sixteen Years in the Making

The invite-only gala was co-chaired by Julie Bell, Tom Cruise, Guillermo del Toro, Greta Gerwig, Sir Lewis Hamilton, Jensen Huang, JR, Steven Spielberg, and Pharrell Williams, and drew a guest list that read like an awards show green room. Oprah Winfrey, Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Harrison Ford, Spike Lee, Samuel L. Jackson, Magic Johnson, Nicolas Cage, Kim Kardashian, Katy Perry, Tyler Perry, Doja Cat, Cynthia Erivo, and Queen Latifah all turned out, alongside museum co-founders Lucas and his wife, Mellody Hobson.

The night featured a 27-piece orchestra, a performance from the vocal collective Voices of Fire alongside Jon Batiste and 75 additional singers, and a drone show narrated by Winfrey and Jackson before The Black Eyed Peas closed things out. Hobson joked about the toll the 17-year project took on her marriage to Lucas, telling the crowd “I suggest your response is a hard ‘no.'” Lucas, for his part, summed up his philosophy on what belongs inside: “No matter what you look at here, it’s emotional.”

Three Cities, Sixteen Years

Lucas first tried to build the museum, then called the Lucas Cultural Arts Museum, at San Francisco’s Crissy Field starting in 2013, but four years of negotiations with the Presidio Trust went nowhere. He pivoted to Chicago in 2014, where the city offered up lakefront property near Soldier Field, only to face a lawsuit from parks advocates that dragged on until Lucas withdrew the proposal in June 2016. Los Angeles won out in January 2017, when the city offered land in Exposition Park near USC, Lucas’s alma mater. Construction broke ground in March 2018, and the opening was pushed back repeatedly, first to 2023 because of the COVID-19 pandemic, then to 2025, before finally landing on this September.

Architect Ma Yansong designed the nearly 300,000-square-foot building on a 13-acre campus in LA’s Exposition Park.

What’s Actually Inside

The building itself spans five stories and 33 galleries across 100,000 square feet of exhibition space, with works from Norman Rockwell, Frida Kahlo, Vincent van Gogh, Diego Rivera, Jacob Lawrence, Jack Kirby, and Judy Baca, plus a dedicated Banksy piece, among many others. Despite the museum’s Star Wars pedigree, concept art from artist Ralph McQuarrie makes up only about 7 percent of the total collection. Other holdings include Joseph Campbell’s 2,900-volume personal library, roughly 3,000 art books donated by Steve and Ann Martin, the 37,000-object Separate Cinema Archive documenting African American film history, and materials from Judy Baca’s half-mile mural The Great Wall of Los Angeles. Lucas’s own first purchase, an Alley Oop comic strip he bought in college for $35, is also on display.

Ma Yansong of MAD Architects designed the building’s organic, sculptural exterior, with Stantec serving as architect of record and Mia Lehrer’s Studio-MLA handling the surrounding parkland. “The building invites everyone to participate in a journey of discovery,” Yansong said of the design. Tracey Bates, who was named the museum’s CEO earlier this year, now leads an institution Lucas has described in blunt terms: “Artists in this collection didn’t just create images.”