George Lucas, the Star Wars film-maker and art collector who with his wife Mellody Hobson, the president and co-chief executive of Ariel Investments, is building the $1bn Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles, made his first-ever appearance at Comic-Con on 27 July to share new details about the institution ahead of its opening next year.
“I’ve been doing this for 50 years now, and then it occurred to me that, what am I going to do with it all?” Lucas said. “I refuse to sell it. I’m not one of the typical high art collectors who buys and then you comes back five years later and say, ‘What happened to that painting you bought, that was so beautiful?’ ‘Well, I sold it for $10m, I made a lot of money on it.’ I could never do that. It’s not what I think art is.”
The panel was moderated by actor and rapper Queen Latifah and featured fellow film-maker Guillermo del Toro (who also serves on the museum’s board) and the production designer Doug Chiang. It began with a six-minute video, narrated by Star Wars actor Samuel L. Jackson, offering new views and renderings of the museum’s distinctly futuristic, 300,000 sq. ft building in Exposition Park, designed by Ma Yansong of the firm Mad Architects.
Interior images show some of its more than 30 galleries, along with immersive spaces featuring reproductions of cave paintings and an entrance flanked by two lamassu sculptures (ancient Mesopotamian statues of winged lions with human heads) from around 710 BC. The museum will also feature art and objects related to the Star Wars franchise, including concept art and models of futuristic vessels.
The video also offered a rapid-fire look at some of the around 40,000 objects said to be in Lucas and Hobson’s collection, from original Iron Man and Black Panther comic book art for to drawings by R. Crumb and Jack Kirby, political cartoons and animation cells. It also showed off some of the highlights of the museum’s fine art collection, including works by Frida Kahlo, Robert Colescott and Norman Rockwell.
From left to right, Guillermo del Toro, George Lucas, Queen Latifah and Doug Chiang at the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art panel at Comic-Con International 2025 at San Diego Convention Center on 27 July 2025 Photo by Eric Charbonneau / Lucas Museum of Narrative Art via Getty Images
“It’s a temple to the people’s art,” Lucas said of the museum. He described his interest in art as being “more about a connection and emotional connection with the work, not how much it cost or what celebrity did it. I don’t think it’s anything anyone will tell you. If you have [an] emotional connection, it’s art. If you don’t, just move onto the next painting.”
Both Del Toro and Chiang praised Lucas and Hobson for placing comics and illustration on equal footing with fine art, eliciting frequent applause from the 6,000-strong crowd inside the San Diego Convention Center.
“Comic art and magazine illustration were kind of looked down upon,” said Chiang, who serves as the senior vice president an executive design director at Lucasfilm, the production company Lucas founded in 1971. “What I love about what George and Mellody are doing with this museum is they are acknowledging and giving respect to artists who really haven’t been highlighted before.”
The panel comes at a moment when Lucas has taken more direct control of operations at his namesake institution. Sandra Jackson-Dumont, the museum’s director and chief executive since 2020, left in March, with Lucas becoming solely “responsible for content direction”. In May, the museum laid off 14% of its staff, including 15 full-time roles and seven part-time positions; many of the cuts came from the museum’s education and public programming departments.
