In keeping with the large-scale budget, the preview trailer for "Sutter's Gold" was ten minutes long and had changeover cue marks printed on the negative - just like a short subject.
This was reportedly Universal's biggest box office disaster of the era. It cost $2 million in 1936 when the typical Universal production cost about $100,000.
The story was bought by Universal in the 20s as a project for Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein, but was shelved when the studio and the director could not agree on the social aspects of the script. In the mid-80s another version was planned as a joint Canadian-French co-production by Moshe Mizrahi's Rosa Productions by New York-based Isram Film Corporation to be shot in the U.S. and Canada, but for reasons that are unclear it was not made.