George Lucas' $1 billion 'Star Wars' museum finds Los Angeles home
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - "Star Wars" filmmaker George
Lucas has settled on Los Angeles for the home of his $1 billion storytelling
museum, after pulling the
project from
Chicago last year.
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said Tuesday that the Lucas
Museum of Narrative Art will be located in Exposition Park in downtown Los
Angeles.
"I
believed in the vision for the Lucas Museum, and we went after it with
everything we have — because I know that L.A. is the ideal place for making
sure that it touches the widest possible audience," Garcetti said in a
statement, thanking Lucas and his wife, Mellody Hobson.
The museum was initially planned for Chicago, but Lucas ran into
legal challenges from an open-spaces group and pulled the project. Garcetti immediately
moved to woo the filmmaker to house the museum in Los Angeles.
The proposed museum, valued at $1 billion and funded by Lucas,
would feature exhibitions of Lucas’ collection of paintings, illustrations and
digital art from the blockbuster "Star Wars" movie franchise he
started in 1977.
"South Los Angeles’s Promise Zone best
positions the
museum to have the greatest impact on the broader community, fulfilling our
goal of inspiring, engaging and educating a broad and diverse
visitorship," the museum’s board
of directors said
in a statement.
The proposed site for the museum is next to the University of
Southern California, where Lucas studied film and met future collaborators
including Steven Spielberg.
Lucas sold his "Star Wars" franchise to Walt Disney
Co. in 2012 for $4 billion.
Disney rebooted the franchise with six new films, including a
new trilogy in the space saga commencing with 2015’s "The Force
Awakens," and standalone stories such as December’s "Rogue One: A
Star Wars Story."
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