Lucas Museum charges $25, and the $1.3bn Getty is still free

Forty million adult tickets. That is what the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art would have to sell, at the $25 it starts charging on Tuesday, to cover the roughly $1bn George Lucas put into building it.

The Broad, the last privately funded art museum to open here to anything like this much attention, took 823,216 visitors in its first year, by its own count. Entry there is free. Run the Lucas Museum at The Broad's rate, with every person through the door paying the full adult price, and the gate needs about 49 years to match the construction bill.

Nobody builds a museum to earn the money back, and the sum is not an accusation. It is a way of showing how little the $25 has to do with the cost of the place. The ticket is a decision about who the museum is for, and it is the decision that separates Lucas from every other collector who has built one of these in this city.

What the other collectors charge

The Getty Center opened on 16 December 1997 at a widely reported $1.3bn, which is more than Lucas has spent, and it has never charged for admission. It charges for parking, and that is the whole of it. The figures for the Getty do not agree with each other, incidentally: the same $1.3bn total is often broken down to $733m covering construction, land, fixtures and professional fees, with the rest absorbed by the two decades of programme around it.

The Broad cost $140m for a 120,000 sq ft building on Grand Avenue and offers free general admission, according to the museum's own fact sheet. Eli and Edythe Broad paid for that one.

The closest comparison is the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, which opened in 2021 at a reported $482m and charges adults $25, exactly what Lucas is charging. The difference is in how the buildings were paid for. The Academy Museum raised its money in public, from donors whose names are on the walls, and answers to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences rather than to one couple. Lucas and his wife, the Ariel Investments chair Mellody Hobson, wrote the cheque themselves and took no outside donors at all.

So the two museums in Los Angeles built for a billion dollars or more sit at opposite ends of the same question. The Getty spent more and asks nothing. The Lucas Museum spent about a billion and asks for $25.

Per square foot the gap is wider than the totals suggest. The building is 300,000 sq ft, with more than 100,000 of that gallery space across upwards of 30 galleries, the museum says. At $1bn, that works out at roughly $3,300 a square foot. Close to three times what The Broad cost to put up.

The $1bn figure is the one CNN and Forbes have both used, and it is what ABC7 reported on gala night. The museum's own press material gives no construction total. A handful of outlets have run $1.5bn. Until Lucas publishes a number, all of them are estimates of a private man's private spending, and the arithmetic above only gets worse for the ticket price if the higher figure is the true one.

Sixteen years, three cities, eight on the site

Lucas has been trying to build this since before Star Wars changed hands. The first approach was to the Presidio Trust in San Francisco, which turned into a Crissy Field proposal and then into nothing. Chicago picked the project up in June 2014 for a lakefront site near Soldier Field, and the campaign group Friends of the Parks sued; Lucas and Hobson abandoned the city on 24 June 2016. Los Angeles was chosen on 10 January 2017. Ground was broken in Exposition Park on 14 March 2018, with an opening promised for 2021.

It then moved to 2023, then to 2025, and lands on 22 September 2026. That is eight and a half years on site and five years later than the date printed on the shovel.

At a press preview this month Lucas put the total at "17 years between getting kicked out of cities and trying to get this built, which is in itself eight years", and added that the project "almost broke my will", as The Hollywood Reporter reported and Variety also carried. CNN counts 16 years rather than 17. The difference is whether you start the clock at the first approach to the Presidio Trust or at the Crissy Field plan that came out of it, which is a fair thing for two outlets to disagree about.

A temple with a turnstile

At Comic-Con in July 2025, in his first appearance at the convention, Lucas called the museum "a temple to the people's art", Artnet News reported. It is a good line and the collection earns it: the inaugural hang runs to more than 1,300 works and puts Artemisia Gentileschi, Vincent van Gogh, Frida Kahlo, Norman Rockwell, Robert Crumb and Banksy in the same building, on the argument that the division between fine art and popular image-making was never worth defending.

The people, though, pay. Adults $25, over-65s $21, and everyone books a timed slot in advance, per the museum's visit page. Under-18s go free, as do active-duty military and California EBT cardholders, and the research library and the gardens are free to anyone who walks in. Memberships run from $140 a year to $600.

Writing in The Art Newspaper in August, the critic Jori Finkel called the pricing "tone-deaf" and questioned a billionaire founder asking visitors for money on top of the ticket, noting that Crystal Bridges, Glenstone, the Getty and The Broad all get people in for nothing. She has a point that is sharper in this postcode than it would be elsewhere. Exposition Park sits in South Los Angeles, and the California Science Center on the same campus has been free for decades.

The counter-argument is that free admission has to be paid for out of an endowment forever, and that a $25 gate is the honest version of a promise a museum can actually keep. Hobson made a version of it on Saturday night, telling the opening gala that she and Lucas "didn't follow any rules" and that "some people don't like it, but we do", as ABC7 reported. Oprah Winfrey, Mark Hamill and the mayor, Karen Bass, were in the room.

It is a defensible position. It is also the first time the most expensive building of its kind in Los Angeles has come with a turnstile, and that is the thing people in the neighbourhood will notice before they notice the van Gogh.

The city needs the footfall either way. Los Angeles has spent this year watching production leave for cheaper states, most visibly when American Idol moved to Georgia, and a 13-acre cultural campus in Exposition Park is one of the few things pulling in the other direction. Whether it pays off is a cost-per-head question, the same one we ran on TIFF's new market a fortnight ago.

The first tranche of tickets, released on 21 July, covers September 2026 to February 2027. The next release is the first honest read on whether $25 in Exposition Park sells out.