Ever since Chicago spurned the Lucas museum, which would have been funded by at least $800 million in philanthropic investments from “Star Wars” icon George Lucas and his wife, Mellody Hobson, a Chicago native, city snobs have pushed two narratives: one that the museum would never get built and another that it would not be any good if and when it did.
Both of them are proving to be nonsense, as was obvious to us from the start.
George Lucas, waving, filmmaker Guillermo del Toro and Doug Chiang, vice president and executive creative director at Lucasfilm, speak onstage at the 2025 Comic-Con International: San Diego on July 27, 2025, in San Diego. (Amy Sussman/Getty)
Back in 2016, Chicago lost a fully funded cultural attraction that would have drawn attention and visitors from all over the world. This was a Midwestern mistake for the ages.
On Sunday, Lucas showed up for the first time ever at Comic-Con in San Diego to get people excited about the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. (Did we mention this could have been in Chicago?) He appeared alongside Oscar winners Guillermo del Toro and Doug Chiang on a panel hosted by Oscar nominee Queen Latifah.
Do you routinely see such folks strolling down Michigan Avenue? Not since Oprah Winfrey left, you don’t.
Samuel L. Jackson narrated the “sizzle reel,” promoting the museum. To say the Lucas appearance was a hot ticket is to understate.
What will be in the 300,000-square-foot museum once it opens on its 11-acre campus in Los Angeles’ Exposition Park next year? Paintings by Frida Kahlo, Maxfield Parrish, Kara Lewis and Norman Rockwell, comic book art from R. Crumb and Jack Kirby, original Peanuts and Flash Gordon comic strips, a fresco panel by Diego Rivera, illustrations by E.H. Shepard for “The House at Pooh Corner.” The comic book covers that introduced Iron Man and Flash Gordon. Concept art from “Indiana Jones.” A life-sized Naboo starfighter.
That’s just a taste. There will be, to say the least, a lot of interest in all those things.
Chicago failed to understand what Lucas meant by “narrative art.” But it’s really not hard: his museum will be made up of the art to which people feel emotional connections and which forms much of the basis of our shared culture. The Lucas museum will be distinct from traditional art museums and will draw accordingly.
Del Toro said Sunday that he, too, will likely deposit his own formidable collection of populist narrative art within the museum.
Lucas called his decade-long endeavor “a temple to the people’s art.”
The people’s art. Chicago would have been its natural home. The dithering and naysaying that these days seems to come with doing anything substantial in this town lost us a potential jewel. What a colossal missed opportunity.
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