History Main / GoldFever

* The samurai film ''Film/{{Goyokin}}'' (and the ForeignRemake ''Film/TheMasterGunfighter'') involves a massacre that happens after a ship carrying gold is wrecked and the local lord wants to LeaveNoWitnesses after some villagers found it. The hero leaves the lord's service in disgust to become a {{ronin}}, only to return after realising a similar atrocity is being planned.

* The samurai film ''Film/{{Goyokin}} (and the ForeignRemake ''Film/TheMasterGunfighter'') involves a massacre that happens after a ship carrying gold is wrecked and the local lord wants to LeaveNoWitnesses after some villagers found it. The hero leaves the lord's service in disgust to become a {{ronin}}, only to return after realising a similar atrocity is being planned.

* An InvokedTrope in ''Film/CaboBlanco'' when Marie tells Giff that the sunken ship that everyone is searching for contains 22 million in gold, in the hope of exciting his interest. "Gold is a magic word" as she later puts it. The ship was actually carrying wealth looted by the Nazis from churches and the victims of concentration camps; when the corrupt police captain realises this, [[EveryoneHasStandards even he turns against the ex-Nazi who's paying him]].

* An InvokedTrope in * ''Film/CaboBlanco'' when Marie tells Giff that the sunken ship that everyone is searching for contains 22 million in gold, in the hope of exciting his interest. "Gold is a magic word" as she later puts it. The ship was actually carrying wealth looted by the Nazis from churches and the victims of concentration camps; when the corrupt police captain realises this, [[EveryoneHasStandards even he turns against the ex-Nazi who's paying him]].

%%* ''Film/TheDarkKnight'': Played with in the Joker's first coup.

* ''Film/ThatManFromRio'' centers around a drab, academic archaeologist who, in pursuit of a lost civilization's horde of diamonds, murders his two associates and abducts the daughter of one of them in his quest for the gems.

* ''Literature/BookOfSwords'': In the ''Second Book of Swords'', the final defense of the Blue Temple's treasure hoard is the greed of the thieves, as any group of thieves who managed to penetrate all the way to the Hoard itself would presumably be overcome with greed and fall to fighting among themselves over the loot, even though there was far more there than any such thieves could hope to carry away. Is somewhat averted here, since Mark and Ben, the actual heroes of the story only end up fighting their less heroic accomplices, and remain loyal to each other. Also, the treasures they are fighting for, the eponymous magical swords, effectively cannot be shared, and can be carried away.

* ''Literature/CaptainVorpatrilsAlliance'': The smuggler Vigo Imola, who's been hired to transport a bunkerful of hidden treasure dating back to the Cetagandan Occupation, decides instead to sell out his clients to their enemies. The consequences spiral out of control, and the government confiscates the treasure. It turns out to be worth ''billions''. In the original deal, Imola was to have received fifteen percent. Instead he goes to prison, and his former clients get a nice fat finder's fee and the satisfaction of telling Imola to his face what a terrible choice he made.

* The Creator/IsaacAsimov story "Gold" concerns a director of holographic films who, after making it big with a version of ''Theatre/KingLear'', is approached by a science-fiction writer (a thinly-veiled version of Asimov himself) with a proposition: make a film out of his story "Three-in-One" (a thinly-veiled version of Asimov's own ''Literature/TheGodsThemselves''), and receive, not credits, but a small chest full of gold. The idea is enough to spur the otherwise-jaded director into accepting. "He did not need the money. He was not sure he did not need the gold." [[spoiler:After the holofilm of "Three-in-One" is a massive success, the writer keeps his end of the bargain and presents the director with a chest of gold - only for the director to push it back across the table, the challenge of getting an audience to connect with blatantly inhuman characters being far more satisfying than the gold could ever be.]]

* ''Anime/SpiritedAway'' has the bathhouse employees going crazy trying to pick up gold from No Face. [[spoiler:It turns out to be just enchanted rocks.]]

* ''Film/CityBeneathTheSea'' has a dangerous radioactive substance stored for protection behind walls of gold bars. Naturally no-one would be stupid enough to steal part of that protective wall and endanger everyone's lives, right? (The gold would be radioactive too, but that isn't brought up.)
* ''Film/CryBloodApache'': After discovering a small cache of nuggets in an Apache camp, the white men murder the tribe and abduct the sole surviving member and force her to guide them to where the gold came from.

* ''Film/DuelForGold'': A band of thieves, rogues and marauders decide to put their differences aside to steal twenty crates of golden ingots from the Imperial bureau, only to be consumed by their greed and backstab each other along the way. This is even more evident between two of the thieves, which are sisters - family means ''nothing'' when all that gold is involved.

** In ''[[Film/TheHobbitTheBattleOfTheFiveArmies The Battle of the Five Armies]]'' [[spoiler:Thorin proves to be at least as nutty as his grandpa, degenerating swiftly into a paranoid recluse who would rather die than give away a single coin. Thankfully he snaps out of it during the final battle.]] A line from Balin implies that treasure that's been part of a DragonHoard carries a genuine curse called "Dragon Sickness" that drives the treasure's new owners to behave much like a dragon - paranoid, greedy and murderously possessive. [[spoiler: While Thrór fell to dragon sickness on his own, it's hinted by Thorin's behavior and even his speech mannerisms becoming more like Smaug that the decades he spent sleeping in the hoard had cursed Erebor's treasures and that curse was consuming Thorin.]]

* ''Film/LustForGold'': This is a major theme. Everybody who learns of the mine is possessed by a near uncontrollable desire to possess its contents.

* ''Literature/TheCallOfTheWild'': A relatively benign case of this dooms John Thornton and his friends (save for Buck). They discover a river full of gold dust. They stay too long mining the huge bounty of gold [[spoiler:and are slaughtered by a passing band of natives]].

** Aladdin is clearly warned to take "nothing but the lamp" from the cave full of treasure. His pet monkey Abu, however, clearly falls for the Gold Fever as he drools over a large gemstone and grabs it, triggering the cavern collapse. [[spoiler:This has the unexpected result of saving Aladdin's life as Jafar was waiting for Aladdin to exit so he could murder him and steal the lamp for himself.]]

** Aladdin is clearly warned to take "nothing but the lamp" from the cave full of treasure. His pet monkey, however, clearly falls for the Gold Fever as he drools over a large gemstone and grabs it, triggering the cavern collapse. [[spoiler:This has the unexpected result of saving Aladdin's life as Jafar was waiting for Aladdin to exit so he could murder him and steal the lamp for himself.]]

* ''Series/TheTwilightZone1959'': In "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS2E60TheRipVanWinkleCaper The Rip Van Winkle Caper]]", a group of four men steal one million dollars worth of gold bricks. Figuring that in one hundred years (2061) no one will remember them, they hide out in a cave in the desert and the mad scientist of the group puts them all in suspended animation to wait it out. [[spoiler: However, upon awakening things start to go wrong as one of the men is already dead and greed soon incites the others to kill. The twist in this episode is that in the future gold is {{worthless|YellowRocks}} and the last man standing dies lugging his worthless cargo across the desert.]]

* ''ComicBook/DisneyDucksComicUniverse'': Scrooge McDuck has some experience with this; in the works of Creator/CarlBarks and Creator/DonRosa, he first struck it rich during the Yukon Gold Rush. In Barks' "The Loony Lunar Gold Rush", the discovery of gold on the moon inspires dozens of would-be space prospectors to travel to the moon... while Scrooge makes a killing selling supplies to the less-prepared miners.

* ''Literature/TheCanterburyTales'': "The Pardoner's Tale" retells an old legend about three young men who learn that a good friend of theirs has perished from a plague. They decide to get revenge by killing [[TheGrimReaper Death himself]] and set out toward a nearby village. Along the way, they encounter an elderly man and demand that he tell them where to find Death; he points them toward a nearby tree, where they discover a chest overflowing with gold coins and immediately get swept up in the fever. Two of the men send a third into town to buy food, only to scheme to murder him when he returns so they can split the treasure two ways instead of three, while the third buys poison and taints their provisions so he can have all of the gold for himself. When he returns, he's immediately killed, and then the other men eat the poisoned food and perish as well...meaning that [[BeCarefulWhatYouWishFor they found Death after all.]]

* ''Film/BulletInTheHead'' features three would-be gangsters with a [[BloodBrothers bond of brotherhood]] who try to strike it rich in late '60s-era Vietnam while [[UsefulNotes/TheVietnamWar The War]] is in full swing. Things go right straight to hell, and Gold Fever, in addition to the hellish experience of the war, is enough to break this bond, which in John Woo's other movies was all but unbreakable.

See also ArtifactOfAttraction, MoneyFetish, {{Prospector}} and especially '''{{Greed}}'''. Related is AppleOfDiscord, where greed might not be the primary motivation, but the end result still turns out to be a free-for-all. Contrast with WorthlessYellowRocks, where someone regards gold (or something else generally considered valuable) as useless junk.

* ''ComicBook/DisneyDucksComicUniverse'': Scrooge Mcduck has some experience with this; in the works of Creator/CarlBarks and Creator/DonRosa, he first struck it rich during the Yukon Gold Rush. In Barks' "The Loony Lunar Gold Rush", the discovery of gold on the moon inspires dozens of would-be space prospectors to travel to the moon... while Scrooge makes a killing selling supplies to the less-prepared miners.

* ''Series/{{Community}}'': Parodied in an episode where the "treasure" is in fact a stash of college textbooks. It becomes this trope both because the characters work at a community college and are in general prone to taking mundane things to absurd levels of SeriousBusiness anyway.

* ''WesternAnimation/TinyToonAdventures'' had an episode of Gold Fever, in which throughout the short they were warned to beware of the "green-eyed monster". It was only after several fights over and thefts of a buried treasure that they realized that ''they'' were the green-eyed monsters.

* ''VideoGames/GoldRush'': While there are other motivations at work, one of the main plot points is the 1848 California gold rush, and all the accompanying "Go West" fervor that came with it.

* ''VideoGame/SuperMarioBros'':

** Every so often, the focus goes to a sub-plot involving a [[SolidGoldPoop gold, jewel-encrusted turd]] that evokes this in anyone who sees it. What comes out of it is a long string of murders, guilt-ridden suicide, and other betrayals as everyone involved tries to be the sole owner by whatever means necessary.

** Gild Tesoro, the main villain of ''Anime/OnePieceFilmGold'', had an obsession with gold. Fittingly, his Devil Fruit allowed him to manipulate and shape gold any way he wanted to. Furthermore, he was able to "Awaken" his Devil Fruit, allowing him to do even more with it. His obsession with gold was the result of his DarkAndTroubledPast making him obsessed over never being weak and thus equating wealth with power.

* The trailer for ''Film/BloodAndGold'' throws in just about every mention of the word 'gold' in the movie--which is a lot, given that the plot involves a hunt for a hidden stash of NaziGold in the latter days of World War 2.

* ''VideoGame/BattlefieldBadCompany'' starts as a light heared modern military first person shoter staring a RagtagBunchOfMisfits. Until the end of the first level, when they find a solid gold bar in the pocket of a dead mercenary. During the second level, you just collect all the gold that you happen to find during your missions to later decide what to do with it, but then Haggard decides to invade a neutral third party country chasing after a retreating truck loaded with gold and shortly after all plans to ever return to the rest of the army are abandoned.

** Nathan Drake and his long-lost brother Sam are hunting for Libertalia, a legendary "pirate utopia" created by Henry Avery and other pirate lords long ago. They soon discover it only to find signs of a massive battle with hundreds of corpses strewn about. It turns out that [[spoiler: the entire "utopia" was all a massive con to trick settlers into handing over their money so the pirates could hoard it. The pirate captains started to fight for the treasure so Avery and Tews poisoned them all to get it themselves. Avery fell further into madness and paranoia to the point of having scores of settlers brutually executed. He finally tried to escape only for Tews to catch up to them. The Drakes eventually find the massive treasure hoard on a ship with the skeletons of Tews and Avery having killed each other for the gold neither could possess.]]

* In the late 2010s and early 2020s, there was a digital equivalent of a gold rush: [[{{UsefulNotes/Bitcoin}} crypto]]. For some reason or another, cryptocurrency was gaining alot of value rapidly, leading people to hoard computer hardware that could, ironically enough, "mine" it. The best bang-for-buck hardware to mine said crypto? Video cards. This led to scalpers buying up whatever video cards they could to sell back. This became especially bad during the COVID-19 pandemic where supply was strained and scalpers armed with bots kept video cards existing only on paper for most people. Worst yet, the scalpers would turn them around and sell them back on the open market for easily 2-3 times their original cost.