With the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art set to open its doors in 2026, George Lucas and Mellody Hobson discuss founding the LMNA, the sale of Lucasfilm to Disney in 2012 and much more with WSJ Magazine. Mellody also goes into more depth in a video interview that you can watch here.
Bringing the museum to life has been a 15-year crusade beset by all kinds of challenges, from cities rejecting his proposal, to upheavals over who would curate the museum, to criticism that he was making a shrine to himself.
Lucas scoffs at that. “I’m making a museum for what I call the orphaned arts,” he says, citing the snobbery that has excluded the illustrators, cartoonists and other commercial artists he’s championing from institutions of fine art. His museum is about “the art people respond to in the real world.”
One inaugural exhibit will feature the designs of Star Wars vehicles. “It’s one gallery out of 33. And I did it grudgingly,” Lucas says with a chuckle. “I didn’t want people to come to the museum and say, ‘Where’s the Star Wars?’”
To turn one of the most challenging projects of his lifetime into a reality, Lucas depended on a new collaborator: his wife, Mellody Hobson. “When you step into the building, you’re stepping into George’s brain,” she says.
“George not only was able to see into the future,” says Martin Scorsese, part of the ’70s cinema vanguard with Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola and others, “but he executed it, he made it. He’s one of the key people responsible for the world we live in now in terms of our art, our technology. His influence is just incalculable.”
Thirteen years after he sold the Star Wars franchise, has Lucas let go of his instinct to manage it? “Disney took it over and they gave it their vision. That’s what happens,” he says. “Of course I’ve moved past it. I mean, I’ve got a life. I’m building a museum. A museum is harder than making movies.”
