The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opens to the public September 22, 2026, in Los Angeles’ Exposition Park, and its inaugural exhibition includes the actual production Landspeeder Luke Skywalker drove across Tatooine in “A New Hope.” The museum’s own announcement, via Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, confirms the vehicle anchors a show called “Star Wars in Motion” alongside speeder bikes from “Return of the Jedi” and the Naboo N-1 Starfighter from “The Phantom Menace.”

Key Points

• The 300,000-square-foot museum opens September 22, 2026, with more than 100,000 square feet of gallery space across 30-plus galleries, per the museum’s own press release.
• It was founded by filmmaker George Lucas and businesswoman Mellody Hobson after a 16-year search that moved the project from San Francisco to Chicago before finally landing in Los Angeles.
• “Star Wars in Motion” features Luke’s original Landspeeder, “Return of the Jedi” speeder bikes, and the first physical build of General Grievous’s Wheel Bike from “Revenge of the Sith.”
• Star Wars material makes up only about 7% of the museum’s total footprint — the rest spans narrative art from prehistoric cave paintings through comics, illustration, and film.
• Individual galleries in the opening show are dedicated to illustrators Norman Rockwell and Frank Frazetta, per the museum’s press materials.

This is not a Star Wars museum wearing a fancier name. Lucas and Hobson built the institution around a much bigger premise: that narrative art — the visual storytelling found in comics, illustration, movie posters, and popular painting — deserves the same institutional respect as anything hanging in a traditional fine art museum. The inaugural lineup backs that up. Alongside the Star Wars vehicles, opening galleries are devoted to Norman Rockwell and pulp-fantasy painter Frank Frazetta, plus work spanning Artemisia Gentileschi, Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Andy Warhol, and underground cartoonist Robert Crumb, according to the museum’s own materials.

Getting here took longer than anyone involved probably expected. Lucas first proposed the museum for San Francisco’s Crissy Field, then shifted plans to Chicago after the Presidio Trust deal fell through, only to abandon that site too following local opposition. Los Angeles was finally announced as the permanent home in January 2017, according to Wikipedia‘s account of the project. Design and construction alone took the better part of a decade, with the building’s opening pushed from an original 2021 target through pandemic delays to this month, and reported construction costs landing around $1 billion, a figure both Forbes and CNN put in their own headlines covering the opening.

For Star Wars fans specifically, the draw is straightforward: a chance to stand in front of hardware that actually appeared on screen, not a replica built for a theme park queue. For everyone else, the museum is betting that Rockwell’s small-town Americana and Frazetta’s barbarian paperback covers belong in the same conversation as a landspeeder prop — proof that the stuff people grew up loving was art all along, even when nobody in a blazer wanted to call it that.