George Lucas will always be remembered for his groundbreaking Star Wars franchise, but the filmmaker has long moved on from it. After having sold Lucasfilm to Disney for over $4 billion in 2012, he is no longer attached to the galaxy he created nearly half a century ago.
In a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal, Lucas didn’t hesitate to set the record straight:
Disney took it over and they gave it their vision. That’s what happens. 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.
A kind of grounded and quietly defiant remark, the 81-year-old filmmaker seems genuinely content to let others steer the Star Wars ship, while he focuses on something that may define his later years even more profoundly: the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art.
George Lucas Is Busy Making a Museum for Neglected Art
For Lucas, art has always been at the core of storytelling. Back in the mid-1970s, when he struggled to convince Hollywood executives to fund Star Wars, it was illustrator Ralph McQuarrie who helped make his dream and visuals come true in the original Star Wars franchise. McQuarrie’s renderings of C-3PO, R2-D2, and Tatooine finally helped 20th Century Fox visualize the universe Lucas had imagined. As Lucas explained to The Wall Street Journal:
People can’t understand what I’m talking about because they’ve never seen it before. That’s why I had so many illustrators working for me. I relied on them to help people get the picture.
He is now applying the same devotion to his latest projects: the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, set to open in Los Angeles in 2026. The museum is designed as a “temple” to what Lucas calls the orphaned arts: the illustrators, cartoonists, and commercial artists whose work has historically been excluded from fine-art institutions.
I’m making a museum for what I call the orphaned arts. The art people respond to in the real world.
Much of the collection, built over six decades, comes from Lucas alone. It includes more than 40,000 pieces, from comic art Lucas collected in college to 160 works by Norman Rockwell, one of his artistic heroes. Furthermore, the museum, designed by architect Ma Yansong, resembles something between a spaceship and a cloud, an 11-acre, futuristic structure that seems to hover above the ground.
However, bringing his vision to life was not an easy task, a 15-year odyssey marked by setbacks. Initially wanting to build the museum in San Francisco, the city rejected his proposal, and so did Chicago.
Fortunately, Lucas’s wife, Mellody Hobson, proved pivotal in keeping the dream alive. Now co-founder and chair of the project, Hobson describes the museum as an extension of her husband’s imagination: “When you step into the building, you’re stepping into George’s brain.”
George Lucas and the Making of Star Wars Turns Into a Graphic Novel
Even as Lucas distances himself from the new Star Wars films, his origin story as the creator of the franchise continues to inspire fresh adaptations. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Lucas’s journey has been reimagined in Lucas Wars: The True Story of George Lucas and the Creation of Star Wars, a graphic novel that chronicles how his bold vision transformed Hollywood forever.
While it was originally published in French in 2023, the 208-page tome has now been translated into English by Jeremy Melloul. Published by Macmillan imprint 23rd Street Books, the graphic novel has been written by journalist Laurent Hopman and storyboard artist and illustrator Renaud Roche. It is available for purchase now and can be bought on Amazon.
While Disney’s Star Wars continues to expand across TV and film, Lucas Wars reminds audiences that the original Force behind it all was a dreamer who saw cinema as a visual art form first. Even when Lucas is busy building a monument to storytelling itself, he will forever remain attached to the world he created.
What do you think about Lucas’ latest comments and Disney’s Star Wars franchise?
The Star Wars franchise is available for streaming on Disney+.
