For context, the person he's talking about is his own mother.
"When the destiny of a great fortune is at stake, men’s greed spreads like a poison in the bloodstream. Uncles, nephews, cousins, in-laws of increasingly tenuous connection. The old woman’s most distant relations had come foraging out of the woodwork."
— Mr. Moustafa, The Grand Budapest Hotel
People show up to funerals and/or deathbeds for a number of reasons: some show up to pay their respects, others to celebrate the death, and still others only come out of a sense of obligation. However, one of the most selfish reasons a person can come to a funeral/someone's deathbed is inheritance.
The attitudes of people who would engage in this behavior can vary; they might skip or be late for the funeral itself but be punctual when it comes time to read the will. They might spend the funeral impatiently waiting for when it comes time to discuss inheritance. Beforehand, they might have either acted kindly towards the soon-to-be-deceased in hopes of being included in the will or not even bothered to hide their eagerness for the death so they could get their inheritance faster. Some of the worst examples might not even bother visiting the deceased on their deathbed or coming to the funeral but have no problem contacting the attendees to demand their inheritance.
The types of characters who act in this way are rarely sympathetic, with some usual perpetrators of this behavior being terrible offspring who believe that inheritance automatically goes to the deceased's descendants, estranged or distant family who believe that they are entitled to inheritance by virtue of family ties, or fake relatives who want to cheat someone out of money. The only time said characters with this attitude are sympathetic is when the deceased is an unpleasant person who most people would only put up with out of necessity or personal gain.
These types of characters often end up not receiving any inheritance, or, if they do, it will either be a paltry sum, come with sort of condition, or will come kind of downside that makes the inheritance undesirable. Short-sighted characters who assume that they will receive a share of the inheritance might even go so far as to get themselves in debt going on shopping sprees and quitting their jobs assuming that they can pay back what they owe from the inheritance and live off of it forever. If said characters find out that they didn't receive any inheritance or that the inheritance they did receive was inferior to what someone else got, expect them to hound the people who got the inheritance/got the better share for some or even all of theirs.
Sub-Trope of Only in It for the Money and Greed. Compare Gold Digger, which this trope overlaps with if a character marries someone to receive inheritance from their in-laws and Unexpected Inheritance, where lack of grief is usually justified by not knowing the deceased or expecting to profit by them. Overlaps with Playing the Family Card if a character tries to use family ties to get their hands on inheritance or Entitled Bastard if someone feels that they're entitled to inheritance. Characters with this mentality might resort to Forging the Will or Inheritance Murder. Contrast Rejecting the Inheritance.
Examples
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Fan Works
- Pokémpanions: In "Withering", Camellia is killed in a stagecoach accident. Initially, her abusive adoptive father Carnivine weeps over her, but he immediately gets over it when he realizes he can take her inheritance. His wife Carla is utterly furious with his Skewed Priorities and divorces him on the spot.
Films — Live-Action
- The antagonist of Casper, Carrigan Crittenden, is introduced sitting in funeral clothes with her lawyer/lackey Dibs at the reading of her father's will. As her father's lawyer lists off the various charitable causes he left his vast fortune to she dismissively stubs her cigarette out on the table in front of her and coldly asks "What did the old stiff leave me?". Whilst Dibs stumbles to try and fix the social faux pas, when she finds out she has only inherited a condemnednote manor, she confesses she only stayed by her dying father's bedside holding his hand as she was waiting for him to kick the bucket so she could see what he'd left her.
- Elvira, Mistress of the Dark: When Elvira learns that her great-aunt Morgana has died and she was named in the will, Elvira only cares that the potential payout could finance the show she wants to put on in Las Vegas. Elvira then makes an absolute nuisance of herself at the reading, irritating all the people there who actually care about the deceased, but gets her comeuppance when she discovers that her inheritance is a broken-down old house, a dog that hates her, and what she initially believes to just be an old cookbook.
- The Grand Budapest Hotel: When Madame Degoffe und Taxis dies, the reading of her will is attended by dozens of distant relatives she barely interacted with, all hoping she left a payout for them.
- Knives Out: Harlan Thrombey's death sends shockwaves throughout his family, who — while highly dysfunctional, having various fraught relationships with the late patriarch, and all eagerly wanting a slice of his fortune — for the most part still sincerely loved him and mourned his loss. This cannot be said for grandson Ransom, singled out as the Black Sheep of the family — he completely skips the funeral and only attends the reading of his will, much to the annoyance of the rest of the family. Subverted because he reveals that after getting into an argument with Harlan, he was struck out of his will, and not only does he shrug off his family's hostility, he takes the opportunity to personally insult them, as well as laugh at their collective misfortune upon learning they were all disinherited in favor of Harlan's caretaker and best friend Marta. This detail ends up later raising the eyebrow of Benoit Blanc, who wonders why Ransom would react in such an understated way, or even show up at all, if he wasn't expecting such revelations, leading him to conclude that perhaps he was, and that he knew way more about the circumstances leading up to Harlan's death than he's leading on. This in turn suggests that even more than the money, the only thing he cares about is laughing at his family's suffering.
Literature
- In A Christmas Carol, during the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come sequence, the only people attending Scrooge's funeral plan to take his belongings after his passing or only be there if lunch is provided.
- Invoked in Animorphs, where Tobias is tracked down and invited to his father's will reading along with his newly-discovered cousin. Tobias acts like a tough street kid who doesn't give a damn about his father since he can't exactly say he's been living as a hawk for months. He also learned the interesting tidbit that said "cousin" is Visser Three in morph. Fortunately his hawk instincts give him a good poker face when the lawyer reveals his father was Elfangor, letting him shrug it off as lunacy, demands to know if there's any money involved, and leaves after the lawyer says no. The Yeerks are left convinced Tobias was nothing but a regular human (and a jerk).
- Making Money: Standard procedure among the Lavishes, a Big, Screwed-Up Family of Old Money who hate each other almost as much as the thought of outsiders getting any of their fortune. Topsy Lavish wills her controlling interest in the Royal Bank to an outsider, making for a very frosty funeral as the others plot to get it back.
But now the funeral was over and the Lavishes were doing what they always did after funerals, which was talk about The Money.
- Starter Villain (2023): Justified — the cash-strapped protagonist had no relationship with his late uncle Jake, so it's a no-brainer when he's unexpectedly offered a house just to officiate the funeral. Despite this, he stops a guest from stabbing the body, and the show of Due to the Dead gets him drawn into Jake's actual business.
- Translation State: Enae's grandmother was a cruel woman who loved to lord her wealth and status over her family, who only put up with it for the chance of a payout when she died. At her funeral, they're eager to put her in the dirt and claim their inheritance... only to learn she had secretly gone broke and left them nothing but a mocking note.
Live-Action TV
- Bottom: In "Apocalypse", Richie learns that his rich aunt has just died. While at first he seems shocked, he quickly starts inquiring about her will, even insisting that her housemaid search the body for it.
- Law & Order: In "The Taxman Cometh" the detectives identify cases of terminally ill patients being treated for cancer at a clinic where the treatment shortened their lives (and in one case, prolonged it despite loss of quality of life) so that they would within a set of dates If they did, a loophole in tax law would be very favorable to their heirs.
- Rizzoli & Isles: "The Best Laid Plans". An elderly, vastly wealthy woman is murdered by use of air embolism. The woman has two sons, one of whom is a successful businessman, the other a drug addict. Given the access to the money and the repeated failed attempts at rehab, the police suspect that the addicted son might have had a motive for murder, especially since his drug of choice, heroin, would have given him the knowledge of how to use a syringe to inject her with the air necessary to cause the embolism. The son, however, turns out to be a Red Herring. He notes that having free access to that kind of money will inevitably lead to his death, and no one would be surprised, least of all himself. The murderer turns out to be the chauffeur, who was the illegitimate son of the murdered woman's late husband, who wanted her to suffer because his father died before he even knew he was his father, and so he never got to know him. However, the woman, as she was dying, was trying to forgive him, which actually left him feeling remorseful about his actions.
- The Sopranos: Janice refuses to fly back to New Jersey for her mother's funerary preparations until Tony agrees to pay for her plane ticket and threatens to leave her out of any of their mother's inheritance. Since Janice is a huge Gold Digger, the threat works; in fact, it works too well, since she insists they throw a big lavish funeral, against their late mother's wishes, because she wants to be the center of attention and seen as an upstanding daughter.
- Discussed on Stargate Atlantis episode "Outcast", where John Sheppard returns to Earth to attend the funeral of his estranged father. When he arrives, his brother Dave assumes he's only there for the inheritance. In fact, John is there to lay the past to rest, but Dave points out that with his long absence, John's given him no reason to think otherwise.
Dave: Look, there's just one thing I wanna know. What's your level of expectation here?
John: What are you talking about?
Dave: I mean, are you gonna challenge the will? I have no idea what it says, of course, but I think I can guess.
John: That's what you wanna talk about? You wanna talk about money?
Dave: That's why you're here, isn't it? You've been gone a long time, John. It's not such a stretch. [...] If I've got the wrong impression of you, it's not my fault. You're the one who left, remember?
Music
- In the Taylor Swift song "Anti-Hero", Swift describes having a dream where an in-law murders her for money, with the family thinking that Taylor left them in her will. The music video further expands on this beat, showing various family members at the funeral who clearly don't care about Swift's death and are just waiting to get to the reading of the will. When they discover that Taylor left them all a grand total of thirteen cents so that all she left them was a proverbial middle finger, everyone gets into a fistfight in front of the casket.
Radio
- The Frantics have a famous sketch called "Last Will and Temperament" where family members of the recently deceased Arthur Muldoon are read his will; his sister Jenny and her wimpy husband Hank are characterized as 'crying crocodile tears' in an attempt to get Muldoon's inheritance. What they're bequeathed instead is the most famous alternate name for the sketch: "A boot to the head."
Video Games
- Hitman 3: While the circumstances surrounding Alexa Carlisle staging her death confuse the rest of the family, Emma seems more concerned about inheriting Thornbridge Manor despite having married into the family. Emma is the illegitimate daughter of Alexa's older brother Montgomery, whom she and her younger brother Zachary killed to make Alexa the family heir, and intended to kill both of them and take back the inheritance in revenge. While she succeeded in poisoning Zachary and can be manipulated into killing Alexa, Emma is unaware that Arthur Edwards took all of the Carlisle fortune, meaning neither she nor her son could inherit the money.
- Soma Union: A diary left by the Great Spirit Form explains that she took care of her parents all her life expecting to get the inheritance to their manor in turn, and was enraged when they made her split it with her brother Dissonance, who left the family behind to travel the world, because she wanted it all to herself. This is a major part of what drove her to create a world of happiness where everyone has to rely on her.
"After months of ridiculous formalities, we have finally settled our parents' estate. It is absolutely despicable that they would try to leave half of the manor to my brother! After he left our family for YEARS to learn the art of swordplay like a rogue! Do they not care for their sweet and perfect princess?! The one who stayed here to take care of them while he traveled the world as if his whole life was an adventure?! It's unfair! COMPLETELY unfair!"
Web Animation
- Etra chan saw it!:
- Akane
combines this trope with Psychological Projection; while at Tokusa's funeral, she sees her sister-in-law Tsutsuji crying, which Akane thinks is hilarious because she assumes that Tsutsuji was just fake crying out of a desire to get extra inheritance. Akane gets called out by Karin, as Tsutsuji visited Tokusa all the time. Akane's husband Katsura is infuriated when he finds out what she said, as unlike him and Tsutsuji, Akane never visited Tokusa, was late to the funeral, didn't go to the crematorium, and only wanted to take part in inheritance discussions. He even goes so far as to divorce her, as, in addition to the previous reasons, he also doesn't want Akane to get any of Tokusa's money. When Katsura asks Akane for a divorce, Akane demands half of the inheritance and claims that Katsura just wants to keep it all for himself.
- Out of Katsura's four children, Kuroki was the only one who actually cared about him, while his other three children Akane, Azami, and Hiiragi only cared about his money and constantly mooched off of him. During Katsura's funeral, Kuroki is the only one who's sad about his father's death, while the other three immediately bring up the inheritance. Unfortunately for the three greedy siblings, Kuroki receives the bulk of the inheritance, as Katsura decided to subtract the amount of money his kids borrowed from him from their respective inheritances and donate it to charity. Kuroki's siblings have the audacity to ask Kuroki for his inheritance, but he refuses because they never cared about their father.
- At Kuroki's funeral, his brother Tachibana, the Black Sheep of the family, shows up and immediately asks for some of the inheritance and the insurance money, even going so far as to pick a fight with Tokusa for trying to stop him. When Tachibana sees Karin, his niece-in-law, he offers to settle for half the money if she sleeps with him. Fortunately, Karin manages to stop Tachibana by having a Drinking Contest with him, which she easily wins due to her high alcohol tolerance. Later, it turns out that Tachibana needed the money because he was in debt to loan sharks, and he ends up being Killed Offscreen for not being able to pay them back.
- Akane
- Manga-Waido: Shinuske's younger brother Soma is a spoiled spendthrift who constantly asks others for money. When Soma's girlfriend refuses to marry him because of his lack of savings, he manages to keep her from breaking up with him by stating that his wealthy parents will leave him an inheritance. At the funeral, Shinuske spends his time looking up information about inheritance on his phone. A week after their parent's passing, Soma asks Shinuske to give him his share of the inheritance, using his status as the favorite alongside his upcoming marriage as justification, going so far as to threaten to beat Shinuske. Shinuske laughs and thanks Soma, because Shinuske's inheritance consisted of an apartment that wasn't worth anything but had high property taxes and very few tenants. Worse, even after Soma sells the land, he doesn't make much money due to the costs of clearing it.
- Monirobo: Yui is the estranged sister of Hajime, who cut ties with her brother and mother and shows up during her mother's funeral in hopes of getting an inheritance. Despite disowning her mother years ago, Yui has the audacity to crash the funeral and tries to steal the donated money, claiming that she's owed money by virtue of being the daughter of the deceased. Unfortunately for Yui, Loan Sharks who she owed money to show up, having leaked the knowledge of the funeral to Yui to catch her. When loan sharks refuse to accept the stolen money, Yui insists that she'll pay them via inheritance since the deceased is her mother. Unfortunately for Yui, the loan sharks know that Yui cut ties with her mother, meaning that she wouldn't get any inheritance.
- Trouble Busters:
- Matthew is an especially repugnant example of this trope; he physically and verbally abuses his dying, elderly, mother, not even trying to hide the fact that he wants her to die quickly so he can get her inheritance faster. He refuses to put his mother in a nursing home and forces his wife Hilary, who actually cares for Matthew's mom, to watch her because he wants to save as much of his mother's money as possible. Matthew doesn't bother spending time with his mother on her deathbed, instead spending his time in Hawaii with his mistress Sandra. When he hears from Hilary that his mother is dead, he cheers at her death and rushes to the funeral to collect the inheritance. At the funeral, Matthew and Sandra show up and explain that they plan to get married after Matthew divorces Hilary. Hilary agrees to the divorce under the condition that they don't split assets, which Matthew and Sandra are happy to hear until they find out via Video Will that Matthew's mother left Matthew nothing and gave the inheritance to Hilary, and since Matthew agreed to not divide any assets, it means he won't get a cent of his mother's inheritance.
- Miles is the estranged brother of Harrison, who, unlike the latter, didn't care about his father. Miles and his wife Raelynn show up to Miles' father's funeral and start making a ruckus, much to the other attendees' disgust. When Harrison tries to get them to leave, Miles agrees only if Harrison agrees to discuss giving up the rights to their dad's estate, which Harrison does. During the funeral, Miles and Raelynn secretly alter the contract to claim that Harrison will automatically give the estate to Miles. Unfortunately for the couple, the estate of Miles and Harrison's father was cheap and ends up being destroyed by a landslide, causing Miles and Raelynn to go into debt.
- Matthew
Web Videos
- Text Theater: Ella's mother-in-law Charlotte shows excitement when she learns that Ella's father is dying, as he's a rich man and she assumes that Ella will give her some of the inheritance. At the funeral, Charlotte cheers and laughs because she assumes that Ella will share the inheritance, even going on a shopping spree and buying a house. Unfortunately for Charlotte, Ella donated it all to charity, meaning that Charlotte is stuck with a bunch of debt.
Western Animation
- Futurama: The episode "The Honking" starts with Bender learning that his distant uncle Vladimir — a wealthy robot in the Robo-Hungarian Empire's capital of Thermostadt — has just passed away. At first, he sounds genuinely upset to hear his uncle has passed, but upon learning about the upcoming funeral and reading of his will, he happily tosses the letter away and exclaims, "Well, I'm rich!"
- The Simpsons: In "Selma's Choice", at the funeral of Marge's great aunt, Patty states during the eulogy that the aunt wasn't a rich woman, prompting nearly everyone to leave. Later, when they were watching the video will, the deceased opened with a long poem, which Homer fast-forwarded. Marge was angry, but Homer put it to a vote. The entire family wanted to skip the poem.
