Inside The Lucas Museum, A Star Wars Fan’s Dream
George Lucas hasn’t given up on Star Wars. Here’s what his latest project means for the franchise.
Despite building out one of the most enduring franchises in history, George Lucas has felt pretty distant from Star Wars lately. Lucas directed his last Star Wars film more than 20 years ago and passed the Lucasfilm reins on to Disney in 2012. The franchise has since tried to move on without him, while Lucas himself seems to be enjoying a retirement of sorts.
The legendary director has spent the past 10 years quietly working on a very different kind of project, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, alongside his wife, Mellody Hobson. The scope of the museum feels pretty removed from the work he did at Lucasfilm: In a comprehensive preview with Vogue, Lucas and Hobson led with the idea of mythmaking in art, the foundational stories we find in anything from an ancient cave drawing to a Wonder Woman comic strip. And that certainly sounds like the main focus of the museum when Inverse caught up with its senior curator, Ryan Linkof, at San Diego Comic-Con 2026.
“It is a museum of visual storytelling, really,” Linkof tells Inverse. “George used this term, the kind of ‘people’s art,’ last year at Comic-Con, which I now just appropriate and use all the time.”
The Lucas Museum is dedicated to “accessible art” — but where does that leave Lucas’ most famous work?
Lucas Museum’s sprawling campus, tucked neatly away in Los Angeles’ Exposition Park, is divided into several smaller galleries. Each focuses on a shared experience — be it warm-and-fuzzy sensations like “love” or “community,” or superheroes and fantasy — with works of art supplementing each sensation. Per Linkof, it’s really dedicated to the art we don’t immediately recognize as such: “The book and magazine illustrations, the comic art, the children’s books, the posters, the films that we consume that influence and inform our lives,” he says, “these kind of baked-in stories that we almost don’t even see.”
Those stories invoke Lucas’ narrative North Star, which inspired a great chunk of the first Star Wars movie: the hero’s journey. It’s the connective tissue that unites Luke Skywalker with Flash Gordon or Frodo Baggins, Bruce Wayne, and Yojimbo. The search for self and the battle of good and evil play out in myriad ways across time, space, and culture, and the Lucas Museum is all about connecting the dots between them.
Star Wars fans needn’t worry that this premise might be too lofty to enjoy, however. Memorabilia from Lucas’ sci-fi fantasy is a big part of the museum’s exhibitions too, making this a haven for those with any love for that galaxy far, far away.
Ralph McQuarrie’s concept art for Star Wars will be on display at the museum.
Linkof wasn’t the biggest Star Wars fan when he started curating the museum with Lucas and Hobson, but after years of working with The Maker, he has “such a deep appreciation” for the world. That’s as good a sign as any that the Lucas Museum will be a visual feast for Star Wars diehards. The Lucas Archives — “a comprehensive collection of props, artwork, and artifacts” from the first six Star Wars films — were previously only available to view at Skywalker Ranch, but Lucasfilm donated the collection to the museum in 2013. They’ll be available to view in a new major exhibition, “Star Wars in Motion,” when the museum opens this September.
“We have some of the most amazing costumes in the collection,” Linktof teases — and that’s not all fans will have to look forward to. The Lucas Archives include “visionary vehicle designs,” like the speeder General Grievous rides into battle in Revenge of the Sith, or the N-1 starfighter Anakin accidentally pilots in The Phantom Menace, as well as other props and artwork. Original concept paintings by legends like Ralph McQuarrie and Doug Chiang will also feature prominently.
The Lucas Museum will also host ongoing screenings in its two state-of-the-art theaters. There’s no word yet on whether Lucas’ Star Wars films will get up on the big screen — but fans will be able to catch episodes of Star Wars Visions, a very new addition to the franchise, at the museum.
The Lucas Museum features work from the first six Star Wars films — and for good reason.
That inclusion brings up the same questions that the curious have always had about Lucas and his feelings on the franchise now. When Lucas retired, there was the sense that he maybe wanted to leave the past behind, and when Disney spearheaded a sequel trilogy that basically rehashed the events of the original trilogy, it seemed clear that Lucas wasn’t the biggest fan. “[They] said, ‘We want to make something for the fans’ ... They wanted to do a retro story,” Lucas told Charlie Rose in 2015. “I don’t like that. Every movie, I worked very hard to make them different.”
More recently, Lucas condemned Hollywood’s need to consult fans in the making of a major movie. He, of course, didn’t mention Lucasfilm or the sequels by name, but it’s no secret that The Force Awakens, The Rise of Skywalker, and the projects that followed have fallen into that same trap. The franchise has been struggling to forge a new path forward, even after more than 10 years of independence. There’s a schism between the “old” Star Wars and the new, and the opening of the Lucas Museum only accentuates it: If nothing else, we probably shouldn’t expect to see any references to the sequels in its opening exhibitions.
There’s definitely some good in the stories that have premiered since Lucas’ departure, but they’ve strayed from the pure ideal of what Star Wars should be. As the Lucas Museum opens its doors, maybe it will serve as the reminder the franchise needs.
