Though it was called by Korngold biographer Brendan G. Carroll "...the high-water mark of motion picture scoring," Korngold nearly failed to write this score. The story opens on the night of January 22, 1938, in Vienna. Korngold was attending a concert given by the pianist Robert Kohner, who was playing the composer's Piano Sonata No. 3 when a telegram arrived, asking Korngold if he could be in Hollywood within 12 days to score Robin Hood. Korngold left Vienna three days later and arrived in Hollywood in early February. When he first saw a cut of the movie, he rejected the commission to write for it, believing it to be too much of an action picture for him to work with. He believed himself to be much more in tune with psychological and atmospheric storylines such as Anthony Adverse, which he had completed for Warner Brothers two years earlier. His aversion to action pictures was principally that it was too difficult to write music of worth which could be heard above the on-screen noise of the frequent action scenes. But fate took a hand and changed Korngold's mind.

Some days later, at the same time that entreaties poured out of Warner Brothers' offices for him to reconsider, it became apparent to Korngold that Austria was about to be subsumed into Hitler's Greater Germany and that he (Korngold) was, therefore, unlikely to be able to return home. He promptly began scoring the movie, a task which was completed in seven short weeks, barely a month before the film was released. But for the arrival of that telegram, Korngold may well have ended up in the gas chambers—as the unfortunate pianist from that January concert did.

Korngold used his earlier "Miss Austria" theme from Rosen aus Florida in the score and also some of the material from his Sursum Corda. The studio orchestra dubbed the score (humorously, but without rancor) "Robin Hood in the Vienna Woods"—a characterization which is much more obvious in the suite the composer later arranged from it. This is the most prestigious of all Korngold's movie projects and is today recognized as one of the most apt and celebrated of all film scores. Unusual for the time, the studio arranged a radio broadcast of practically the entire score just a week before releasing the film, having recognized the tremendous worth of the music. Later that year, Korngold won his second Oscar (this time awarded to him, unlike the Anthony Adverse Oscar that was given to the studio), presented by Jerome Kern, a composer he greatly admired. He was paid the surprising sum of $12,500 for the commission—significantly more than practically any other film composer of the time—and Robin Hood, along with The Sea Hawk, remains today one of the first routes through which listeners are introduced to his music.

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