Director J. Gordon Edwards began work on the film in Jun 1920, according to the Jul 1920 Picture-Play Magazine. Betty Blythe’s casting was announced in the Jul 1920 issue of Motion Picture Classic, and the production budget was cited as $700,000 in the 12 Feb 1921 Exhibitors Herald.
       Large sets were under construction at the Fox Film Corp. studios in Hollywood, CA, as of late Sep 1920, as stated in the 25 Sep 1920 Motion Picture News. Also at that time, Fox studio manager Sol Wurtzel was in the process of casting, Fritz Leiber had been hired to co-star with Betty Blythe, and Carl Harbaugh was traveling from New York to Los Angeles to assist in the direction of the picture. An 11 Sep 1920 Motion Picture News brief predicted that principal photography would begin within the next two weeks.
       The Nov 1920 Photo-Play Journal noted that costumes were expected to be even skimpier than those seen in J. Gordon Edwards’s previous film, Cleopatra (1917, see entry).
       An item in the 26 Aug 1921 Call [Perth, Australia] stated that The Queen of Sheba featured “the first Roman chariot race ever staged for the screen.” The sequence was filmed over the course of two weeks on an amphitheater set at Fox studios, and required 3,500 workers, thirty horses, and ten chariots. Location filming for desert sequences took place in Oxnard, CA, where 600 cast and crew members, thirty-one chariots, fourteen camels, and 300 horses were used, as noted in the 26 Mar 1921 Motion Picture News.
       A 15 Jan 1921 Motion Picture News item reported that final scenes were being shot. A 5 Feb 1921 item in the same publication announced that filming was concluded. The picture was assembled and titled as of 24 Dec 1920, according to a Var brief published that day, and was set to open in early 1921 “as a super-special at a Broadway house” in New York City.
       Special publicity representative Will Page was hired to “write pieces and stage stunts” to promote the picture in advance of its 10 Apr 1921 premiere at New York City’s Lyric Theatre, according to the 9 Apr 1921 Moving Picture World and 16 Apr 1921 Exhibitors Herald. The 1 Jan 1921 Motion Picture News noted that The Queen of Sheba would open at Los Angeles, CA’s Auditorium theater, following the May 1921 run of Over the Hill (1917, see entry).
       Within the first few months of release, President Warren G. Harding and friends viewed the film at a private screening, according to the Sep 1921 Motion Picture Magazine.
       A 24 Dec 1921 Exhibitors Herald item noted the film “had a New York run of six months without a break.”
       The Jun 1922 issue of The Educational Screen listed The Queen of Sheba as one of the year’s “Fifteen Best Productions (of those reviewed so far).” It called it “The best spectacle film since Griffith's Birth of a Nation.”