Thursday, June 12

George Lucas Museum Lays Off 14% of Staff Targeting 2026 Opening

The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, the museum founded by George Lucas and his wife, Mellody Hobson, laid off 15 full-time employees last week, the Los Angeles Times reported, including people from the education and public programming team. Moreover, seven part-time, on-call employees had their roles “eliminated”, the paper added. The layoffs amount to 14% of the staff.

 

The scene, which took place last Thursday morning, was described as “shocking and chaotic” by two sources to the LA Times. One of the people laid off was the museum’s curator of film programs, Bernardo Rondeau, who was not at the premises when it happened. Instead, the news was brought up to him while at the Cannes Film Festival. He posted on LinkedIn:

 

“As of today, my role as Curator, Film Programs at the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art has been made redundant, effective immediately. I’m deeply grateful for the time I’ve spent there and for the many talented people I’ve had the privilege to work with.”

 

In a statement, the museum said that the layoffs were the product of the museum’s effort to focus their attention into opening next year, as currently planned. They said: “It is a tremendously difficult decision to reorganize roles and to eliminate staff, but the restructuring will allow the museum’s teams to work more efficiently to bring the museum to life for the public.”

 

2017 concept art of the Lucas Museum

 

Lucas is currently overseeing “content direction”, one of the two top management roles, along with Jim Gianopulos, former chairman and chief executive of Paramount Pictures and 20th Century Fox. According to the LA Times, Lucas, who assumed the role after Sandra Jackson-Dumont exited as the museum’s director and chief executive on April 1 (the position was then split between Lucas and Gianopulos), was not “engaged in the education and public programming”, which had been a priority for Jackson-Dumont. The museum added in a statement:

 

“Education remains a central pillar of the Lucas Museum. One of the main reasons Los Angeles’s Exposition Park was chosen as the location for the museum was its proximity to other museums, USC, and more than 400 schools in a five-mile radius. The importance of education for the museum can be seen by the educational spaces baked into the museum’s design from the beginning, including 10 large classroom spaces, a vast library, and two state-of-the-art theaters. Educational program plans are still in development, and we look forward to sharing more closer to opening.”

 

Construction for the $1 billion museum started back in 2018 and suffered a major delay in 2022 due to shortages because of supply chain demands. The opening was then pushed from 2023 to 2025, and earlier this year, it was delayed again to 2026. It is located in Exposition Park, Los Angeles, a 10-minute car ride away from the Los Angeles Convention Center, where Star Wars Celebration will be held in April 2027.

 

Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as movies from Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.

source: www.starwarsnewsnet.com