Boone's relationship with Lucas began in 1977, when he traveled to Northern California to see a rough cut of Star Wars. The screening was held outside San Francisco in a room full of sofas and easy chairs. "It was a weeknight, and the bus got lost on its way … arriving almost two hours late," author Dale Pollock recounted in his 1984 book Skywalking, quoting Boone as thinking, "Someone has got more courage than they are entitled to because this group is just liable to sit down and fall asleep." No one fell asleep, least of all Boone. Later, during dinner at a nearby Italian restaurant, he sat slumped in his chair, blown away by what he'd just seen. And also, presumably, a little daunted.
The film had to sell $32 million ($135 million today) worth of tickets for Fox to recoup its investment, though it secured only $1.5 million in guarantees from theaters. But Boone started thinking outside the box. The summer movie season had always begun in late June, after schools let out. Lucas and Boone argued for opening Star Wars a month earlier, around Memorial Day, on just a couple of screens in big cities, betting that it could attract young people who would spread word-of-mouth while they were still in school. John Krier, then president of Exhibitor Relations, would recall: "Ashley was an astute judge of pictures. He said Star Wars would do over $200 million before anyone had seen the picture."
On May 1, about three weeks before its release, a test audience was assembled in San Francisco, and Ladd, Boone and other Fox execs sat in the back row to monitor reactions. Boone Isaacs — who was working on another 1977 sci-fi film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind — also was there as Boone's guest and, 43 years later, recalls the crowd's reaction: "By the time that Millennium Falcon got across the screen, everybody was standing and screaming. I remember the guys — Laddie, Ashley and all of them — were kind of huddled together and hugging."
Star Wars debuted May 25 in 32 theaters nationwide. According to Pollock, "Boone gambled by opening it on a Wednesday rather than the weekend and began shows at 10 a.m. in New York and Los Angeles. By 8 a.m., when the theater doors opened, there were long lines in both cities." Lucas wanted to be far, far away when the weekend grosses came in, so he scheduled a vacation in Hawaii. Boone was the one who phoned him regularly to report the numbers. And there were big numbers to report. Star Wars propelled Fox to its most commercially successful year ever and ultimately became the highest-grossing film of all time, with $776 million worldwide ($3.3 billion today). An Associated Press story back then noted, "Time-worn methods of selling movies are getting a shake-up by a new generation of marketers, and one of those leading the revolution is Ashley Boone."