George Lucas Finally Got His Museum — And Lit Up the Sky With Star Wars to Prove It
George Lucas got his opening night. On September 19, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art threw a star-studded gala in Los Angeles — Tom Cruise, Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill, Samuel L. Jackson, Steven Spielberg, Oprah, and dozens more — capped by a drone show that lit up the sky with Star Wars imagery. The museum opens to the public September 22.
I wrote last week about Star Wars Detours — George Lucas's shelved animated comedy series, thirteen years in a vault, finally getting a public screening as part of this museum's opening. At the time, that felt like the headline: a piece of lost Star Wars history quietly resurfacing in a museum theater. Watching how the actual opening night played out, it's clear the Detours screening wasn't the main event. It was one small, personal piece of something much bigger Lucas has been building for over a decade.
What Actually Happened
The gala on September 19 was, by every account, an Oscars-or-Met-Gala-tier event. Tom Cruise, Leonardo DiCaprio, Harrison Ford, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, Christopher Nolan, Oprah Winfrey, Michael B. Jordan, Cynthia Erivo, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Spike Lee — an absurd density of Hollywood royalty for what is, on paper, a museum opening. And then, specifically for this fandom: Mark Hamill, Samuel L. Jackson, and Hayden Christensen all in attendance. At nine o'clock, the crowd moved to the roof deck as Oprah and Samuel L. Jackson introduced a drone show that filled the sky with Star Wars imagery alongside pieces from the museum's collection, while the Black Eyed Peas performed. The museum opens its doors to the general public on September 22 — the same day, notably, as the Detours screenings I wrote about last week and the release of Dark Horse's Galactic Tales of Terror omnibus.
Why This Is Bigger Than a Building
Lucas has been trying to build this museum, in one form or another, for over two decades — famously getting turned down by both Chicago and San Francisco before Los Angeles finally said yes. That's not incidental to what the museum actually is. George Lucas has spent most of his post-Star Wars career arguing, loudly and often to a skeptical industry, that "narrative art" — comic panels, concept paintings, illustration, the stuff that tells a story visually and gets dismissed as commercial or populist — deserves the same institutional respect as anything hanging in an established fine-art museum. At the gala, Lucas put it plainly: "I believe it wholeheartedly that you get to decide what art is... you can't say this is art and this is not art." That's not a throwaway line for a filmmaker whose entire career has been shaped by people telling him space opera wasn't serious enough to be taken seriously.
Seen through that lens, last week's Detours news reads differently now. A shelved Star Wars sitcom getting screened in a museum theater isn't a curious footnote — it's Lucas practicing exactly what he's preaching. If narrative art includes the comic strip and the pulp paperback cover, it also includes the goofy, self-indulgent thing he wanted to make with Seth Green just because it made him laugh. The museum isn't just going to house Star Wars concept art and Empire Strikes Back storyboards treated as prestige objects — it's making room for the silliest, least "important" corners of his career too, and treating that inclusion as the point rather than an afterthought.
What the Drone Show Actually Signals
It's worth dwelling on that roof-deck moment specifically: Star Wars imagery, projected across the Los Angeles sky, at the literal culmination of a project Lucas has spent over a decade fighting to get built. That's not marketing — Lucasfilm and Disney don't own this museum, Lucas and Mellody Hobson do, entirely independent of the franchise's current corporate stewardship. When Star Wars gets to be the visual centerpiece of George Lucas's own museum's grand opening, on his own terms, funded by his own money, that's a statement about which parts of his legacy he considers worth spotlighting when nobody at Disney gets a vote.
The Takeaway
The Lucas Museum opens to the public tomorrow, and everything I wrote last week about Detours quietly resurfacing turns out to have been the opening act for a much louder statement: George Lucas, at eighty-one, finally got the institution he spent decades fighting for built, and he chose to light up the sky with Star Wars on the way in. May the Force be with everyone lining up at the doors this week — they're about to walk into something Lucas has been trying to build since before some of them were born.
Comments (0)
Log in to leave a comment.