Los Angeles has a striking new cultural anchor: the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, co-founded by George Lucas and Mellody Hobson, has opened in Exposition Park. The building alone is a reason to visit — a 300,000-square-foot structure designed by Ma Yansong of MAD Architects with Stantec, set within an 11-acre campus that includes a park landscaped by Mia Lehrer of Studio-MLA.
What sets this museum apart is its film program. Rather than scheduled screenings with fixed start times, two state-of-the-art theaters run continuous, drop-in sessions so visitors can wander in whenever they like. The idea, according to senior curator Ryan Linkof, is to let people encounter cinema as a living art form at their own pace — an alternative to the traditional museum film screening.
The two venues are named after cinema pioneers. The Robert Flaherty Theater leans documentary, screening the museum-commissioned series Seeing is Believing: The Story of Narrative Art (directed by Robin Dashwood), Howard Suber and Laura Gabbert's 2024 series The Power of Film, Robert Mann's Comic Book Confidential, and documentaries about artists in the collection — a roster that includes Norman Rockwell, Diego Rivera, Maurice Sendak, Charles Schulz, Jim Lee, J.C. Leyendecker and Weegee.
The Slavko Vorkapich Theater goes broader and deeper into film history. Its rolling program includes Vorkapich's own montage work for classics like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, silent-era shorts from Georges Méliès, Edwin S. Porter and W.K.L. Dickson, Winsor McCay animations, experimental films by Man Ray and László Moholy-Nagy, early Disney and Fleischer sound cartoons, Norman McLaren's work, Looney Tunes, anime including Cowboy Bebop, an episode of Star Wars: Visions — and, delightfully, George Lucas's own student films from 1965 to 1969.
For travellers, this is an easy add to any LA itinerary. Exposition Park already holds the California Science Center (home of the Space Shuttle Endeavour) and the Natural History Museum, and it's served by the Expo Line light rail, so you can skip downtown parking entirely. The drop-in format means you can duck into a theater for 20 minutes between gallery visits rather than planning your day around a screening — ideal for travellers who like culture without a rigid schedule. Film buffs could happily burn half a day here; families pairing it with the neighboring science center will find an easy full-day outing. If your trip includes Star Wars nostalgia, seeing Lucas's early student work on a proper cinema screen is a rare treat.
CEO Tracey Bates frames the theaters as spaces to connect with moving images as one of the most transformative modes of visual storytelling — and in a city built by the movie industry, it's fitting that a museum devoted to narrative art makes film central rather than an afterthought.
