The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art is now accepting reservations for its Skywalker Grill restaurant weeks before the $1 billion institution opens its doors in Los Angeles, capping a decade-long saga that saw two cities lose their bids to host it.
George Lucas and his wife, businesswoman Mellody Hobson, co-founded the museum, which sits on a seven-acre site in Exposition Park in South Los Angeles. The museum announced on Wednesday that Skywalker Grill, a restaurant inspired by Lucas' private creative compound, Skywalker Ranch, in Northern California, will open alongside the museum on September 22. Reservations are already live on the booking platform Resy, as the New York Post reported.
The grill's menu leans on locally grown ingredients and classic American fare: a Skywalker Ranch Wagyu burger, Dungeness crab cakes, lobster corn dogs, house-made pastas, seasonal salads, and communal appetizers. The museum's messaging encourages "casual attire" and "fan-inspired looks," pitching the restaurant as a come-as-you-are destination rather than a white-tablecloth affair.
Getting the Lucas Museum to Exposition Park took years and required two other major cities to fail first. Lucas originally planned to build on Chicago's lakefront, on a parking lot south of Soldier Field. Then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel backed the project, pledging to work with the community and saying he "can't thank George and Mellody enough." The plan called for moving existing parking underground and replacing asphalt with additional lakefront parkland.
Chicago's bid collapsed under legal challenges from preservationists. Lucas shifted his attention to San Francisco, where the Presidio Trust unanimously rejected his original proposal for the Crissy Field site after four years of planning. Environmental groups drove the opposition. A backup plan on Treasure Island ran into concerns about sea-level rise and seismic instability.
Los Angeles stepped in and offered a permanent seven-acre lease at Exposition Park for just $20 per year. Breitbart reported that the Lucas museum collection is conservatively valued at $400 million, accompanied by a $700 million endowment gift. Former Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti called it "a real triumph for the city of L.A." Jeffrey Katzenberg, the entertainment executive, said the museum would be "a transformative opportunity."
An official unveiling date for the museum was first announced in November 2025. Now, with the September 22 public opening weeks away, the focus has shifted from real estate battles to what visitors will actually find inside.
The museum explores visual storytelling and houses Lucas' personal collection of illustrations, artworks, and film artifacts. It features two theaters and a film screening program. One draw the museum is promoting: the public debut of "Star Wars: Detours," a scrapped animated comedy series developed by Seth Green and Matthew Senreich. The show was shelved years ago and has never been released to the public.
Whether "Detours" screens on opening day or at a later date remains unclear. The museum has not disclosed Skywalker Grill's full pricing, capacity, or operating hours.
Public appetite for Lucas-branded attractions has run well ahead of comparable cultural institutions. A 2014 Chicago Tribune poll found that more than six in ten Chicago voters said they would visit the Lucas Museum once built, a level of enthusiasm that dwarfed support for the Obama presidential library, which only 47 percent of voters favored funding with tax dollars. One Chicago police officer, Kevin Dwyer, captured the skepticism about the Obama library bluntly: "How many people are going to go to it? It isn't really the first vacation destination for any families that I know of."
Lucas' museum, by contrast, never asked for a dime of public money. The collection, the endowment, and the building itself were privately funded. Los Angeles gave up a parking lot and got a billion-dollar cultural anchor in return.
That is the kind of deal taxpayers can live with, a private citizen building something people actually want to visit, on his own tab, in a city willing to say yes.
