Bad Guys Have Better Budgets - TV Tropes

Sir, I shall begin with the economic distribution report. Due to the commercial disruption operation, we have gained control of 80% of the world's trade in wool and other key products. Armament exports are progressing smoothly. Anticipated profits will meet three percent of our budget. Our Neo-Atlantis operation has strengthened its foothold in the banking sector. It now controls one and a half percent of the world's currencies.

• The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, REALLY Love You: In Volume 3, Hakari’s wealthy mother finds out that her daughter is dating a boy with four other girlfriends and issues a Break Up Demand for Hakari. Rentarou is frustrated that he’s just an Ordinary High-School Student, but decides to take his chances and break into the Hanazonos’ Big Fancy House, filled with security guards and infrared sensors, to try and rescue Hakari.
• Gundam:
  • The Principality of Zeon from the original Mobile Suit Gundam, despite being a small group of colonies, have the resources and money to fight the Earth Federation with M'Quve once boasting that they had enough to fight for ten years despite losing their mining resources in Odessa. However, the one thing they don't have is manpower as Interservice Rivalry and the Federation playing catch up robs them of such valuable resources.
  • Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury: A recurring issue for the heroes in the first half of the show is that they're mostly impoverished Earthians (and one Mercurian, not that she's any better off financially) going up in duels against the heirs of the three wealthiest companies in the solar system. Gundam Aerial is good enough to beat just about anything their rivals throw against them, but Earth House can't afford to make repairs when she's damaged or modify her for environments she's not originally intended for.
• My-HiME: The HiME, by and large, come from average backgrounds. Mai, Natsuki, and Mikoto are all explicitly orphans. Natsuki is said to have an estranged wealthy father who provides her living expenses, but she makes it clear that the bad guys have more resources than her in her shadow war against them. Nao, while not an orphan per se, has a mother who has spent years in a coma after a home invasion. Background conversations imply that Akane comes from a troubled home life. Yukino explicitly states that when she first met Haruka neither of them was from a wealthy family, though Haruka's family became Nouveau Riche, but Haruka ardently remained Yukino's friend. The two ancient conspiracies working against them, District One and The Searrs Foundation, are both high-financed, with the former being a secret but official part of the Japanese Government and the latter being capable of summoning an armed force complete with tanks, battleships, aircraft carriers, and a Kill Sat, as well as developing an android bodyguard for their own artificial HiME, Alyssa Searrs.
• Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water: Neo Atlantis controls most of the world's economy, allowing them to recreate Atlantean tools with Victorian-Era technology, including a Kill Sat. Meanwhile, Nemo and the Nautilus crew can afford only a base under Antarctica.
• Pokémon: The Original Series: Ash and Misty are both 10 years old, and Brock is 15, wandering from town to town on foot searching for Pokemon to capture and use, as well as competing for various gym badges. Their enemies, Team Rocket, zigzag this. While Jessie, James, and Meowth aren't shown to be much better off than the heroes, it is usually because of their own foolishness, with the main body of Team Rocket, financed by Giovanni, having their fingers in a lot of pies, able to finance a fake Pokemon spa, for example, run the gym in Viridian City, and genetically engineer the powerful psychic Pokemon Mewtwo.
• Project A-Ko: A-ko's got this going against her twice over. First, at school, her nemesis is B-ko Daitokuji, the daughter of a wealthy industrialist who is so obscenely wealthy that B-ko is able to design amazingly advanced robotic weapons systems to try and eliminate her rival for C-ko's affections (or so B-ko thinks, anyway). And then, as if to complicate matters, A-ko also has to rescue C-ko from an alien battleship because it turns out that C-ko is a lost Alien Princess, and the entire might of an interstellar empire is bearing down on Earth to get her back. They just forgot to ask C-ko if she wanted to go in the first place.

• Batman: Bruce Wayne usually is in the Fiction 500, but enemies such as Ra's Al Ghul and the Court of Owls have, by dint of centuries of manipulations, even more money. In the aftermath of a few arcs such as The Joker War, Wayne has occasionally lost most if not all of his fortune as well. It's taken even farther in Absolute Batman, where Bruce is a Working-Class Hero while villains like Black Mask and Joker are fabulously wealthy.
• Spider-Man: A lot of Peter Parker's issues come from him trying to balance being Spider-Man with being able to pay the bills and taking care of his elderly Aunt May. Among his enemies, there are the wealthy businessmen Norman Osborn (Green Goblin), Roderick Kingsley (Hoggoblin), and the Kingpin of Crime, Wilson Fisk.
• Paperinik New Adventures: In the PK 2 sequelseries, former Greater-Scope Paragon Everett Ducklair becomes the Big Bad, meaning that Paperinik no longer can make use of his toys and gadgets. He's thus left working as a mall security guard, using an old abandoned factory as headquarters, and using whatever old gadgets he can salvage, while Everett has the resources of an empire at his beck and call.
• Superman: While, yes, Superman is faster than a speeding bullet and all that, he still has a normal job as a reporter for the Daily Planet, and was raised on a Midwest farm, and has gotten in trouble with certain problems related to money. On the other hand, modern takes of his eternal nemesis Lex Luthor portrays him as a billionaire on the same level, if not more, than Bruce Wayne, rich enough to have an anti-Superman budget to fund his battles against the Man of Steel.
• Tale of Sand: Exaggerated. Mac, the protagonist, is just an average, lower-class guy trying to survive on his own in the desert. He is being pursued by Patch, an elegant, wealthy mercenary with a variety of weapons, minions, and other tools at his disposal, including a freaking lion. Enforced by some character notes which hint that Patch represents the person that Mac wants to be.

• Dungeon Keeper Ami: Inverted; Ami is a hero trapped in a setting where she is forced to masquerade as a villain. Compared to every other Evil Overlord, she has enough wealth that some people are seriously thinking she just conjures it from thin air. Which she sort of does, by the power of magic and modern science.
• "See You In the Funny Papers" was a Doctor Who/Danger Mouse/Who Framed Roger Rabbit crossover in which Baron Greenback bankrolls a device Judge Doom created that destroys all the comic books where the heroes win and they can merchandise comics where the villains win. Harry Sullivan (from the Tom Baker-era of Who) is tasked with stopping them.
• Vow of Nudity: Goes without saying when the heroine fights naked and armed only with a primitive spear, but even aside from that, the Genasi Empire has vast displays of wealth and technological advancements over the rest of the continent. It's the reason they're slowly but inexorably conquering every other territory, putting Haara and her allies in increasingly-dire straits despite her individual accomplishments opposing them.

• The Incredibles: Due to public backlash against superheroes, Mister Incredible is reduced to being Bob Parr, and works in a cube farm at an insurance company. He and his wife, the former Elasti-Girl, live in a ranch house in suburbia. In contrast, the villain, Syndrome, has the island of Nomanisan all to himself, where he's built an Elaborate Underground Base. Syndrome remarks that he used his Gadgeteer Genius skills to craft weapons for the military, which proved highly lucrative.
• Robin Hood (1973): Prince John is, as his title says, a Prince, with all the wealth and privilege that entails. And his taxes have the people of Nottingham in dire straights. Indeed, Prince John even permits the Sheriff of Nottingham to take money from the local church's poor box. Robin Hood and Little John, by comparison, live as outlaws in the woods, and they steal from the rich to give to the poor, frustrating the Sheriff and his posse to no end. They even open the film stealing from Prince John himself, from the solid gold hubcaps of his carriage to the very clothing off of his back.

• Indiana Jones always seems to be outspent by his adversaries, which may well have necessitated his use of the Indy Ploy.
  • Raiders of the Lost Ark: When the U.S. Government decides that it wants Indy to find out why the Nazis are after an artifact from one of Indy's old acquaintances, he figures out that they're looking for the Ark of the Covenant. He is sent on his own to find it, and while the U.S. government is seemingly backing him, his rival Belloq has access to the financing and resources of the Nazis, along with several of their top officers and such accommodations as a submarine and a private island to test the Ark when it's in their possession.
  • Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom: Twice over. First, Indiana has to confront Lau Che, a wealthy Chinese businessman, to the point where he unwittingly books his escape flight on one of Lau Che's airplanes. After he survives Lau Che's attempt to have him killed by a plane crash, he finds himself faced with nothing but the clothes on his back, his companions Short Round and Willie, and his wits and whip against a Thuggee cult based out of a maharajah's palace.
• The International is a global banking conglomerate with billions of dollars at its disposal, with which they finance warlords, crime syndicates, and government corruption. They also payroll a cadre of killers that slay auditors and investigators who probe too deeply. An Interpol agent and a Manhattan prosecutor, while decently funded, find themselves pitted against an evil multinational outfit with its own army and very deep pockets.
• The Training Montage in Rocky IV shows Rocky Balboa running outside, chopping wood, hauling logs and rocks, and doing exercises with simple (or no) equipment on a farm in the dead of winter, while his rival Ivan Drago has the full resources of the USSR at his disposal, from high-tech exercise equipment in a private gym to performance-enhancing drugs.
• Star Wars:
  • The Galactic Empire collected taxes from the member planets as well as collected resources from the mineral-rich planets, sometimes to the point of strip-mining the planet as well as enslaving the natives. As revealed in Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Palpatine annexed Scipio, the homeworld of the Intergalactic Banking Clan to the Republic after Rush Clovis was framed for treachery and eventually seized its resources to build two Death Stars to subjugate the galaxy. In contrast, the Rebel Alliance is funded by few Republic-sympathetic Senators who could see Palpatine is steadily seeing the Senate as expendable and cannot openly fund them in possibility of a crackdown, as well as the starships and X-Wings smuggled with the help of Princess Leia and Luthen Rael.
• Transformers: Age of Extinction: Concurrent to the war between the Cybertronians is the conflict between the Yeager family that discovers and befriends the Autobots and the Government Conspiracy known as Cemetery Wind attempting to destroy them. Cade Yeager is specifically a down-on-his-luck working-class inventor struggling to make ends meet, while a major facet of Cemetery Wind's operation is Kinetic Solutions, Inc. and its CEO, Joshua Joyce, who have used their resources to successfully crack Transformium, which they use to develop their own artificial Transformers.

• Full Metal Panic!: While Mithril is a secret organization that has wealthy backers, a frequent problem that they are faced with is that their rival organization, Amalgam, seems to be much better funded, to the point that on several occasions the mercenaries who work for Mithril are convinced to become moles for Amalgam because that organization offers better pay. Indeed, it is a telling point when Sousuke flat out tells the higher-ups at Mithril that he's not a real Sergeant, he's a mercenary, and he never sold his soul. He offers to keep working for Mithril, even at half his existing pay, and keep protecting Kaname, and if they're not happy with that, he'll pay out the remainder of his contract and protect Kaname anyway.

• Leverage:
  • While the Leverage Team is hardly poor, they often make their money by the stocks of the people they plan on ruining. As a result, if the Villain of the Week doesn't fall, they don't make any money. And indeed, in one episode, "The Low Low Price Job", Nate acknowledges that a large box store organization is simply too large for them to take down because the company has no single point of attack, too many executives, and too much money. The best they can settle for is taking down one store in a small community before it ruins the town.
  • The overarching arc of Season 3 is that the team is tasked with taking down Damien Moreau, described as "THE Big Bad", a wealthy financier who funds terrorists, cartels, mafia, arms dealers, and the like. Moreau is so cautious and clever at hiding his crimes that they have to resort to framing him for the crimes of the very person who set them after him in the first place, and them getting his remaining political ally to find it in their own best interest to seize Moreau's assets and have him imprisoned on an island with no extradition treaties.

• Mage: The Awakening: Given they can regularly make diamonds from bricks and easily pick the winning lottery numbers, most mages can easily acquire wealth, represented by the Resources Merit. However, the Seers of the Throne, as servants to the Exarchs and wannabe secret chiefs of the world, regularly have access to the Luxury Merit, where even the lowest version covers a lifestyle beyond the dreams of avarice. The catch is, it is entirely conditional on the benediction of your superiors, and given that we're talking about the Seers here, it can be yanked away easily in the face of the slightest screw-up.

• ANNO: Mutationem: The Consortium is an N.G.O. Superpower that possesses an enormous amount of technology and funds they utilize to study numerous supernatural occurrences and capture beings that was created by the Limen crater, alongside having major involvement in projects that revolved around the creation of Artificial Humans to grant them special innate abilities to use them for their own purposes. Multiple Story Breadcrumbs reveal that The Consortium secretly formed a collaboration with various Mega Corps such as Eindersohn Industries to engage in the creation of offensive battle mechs to have them as part of their personal forces with very large finances.
• Borderlands: All the Vault Hunters are mercenaries for hire traveling through the galaxy in search of the Vaults, but also seeking the Vaults are the Mega Corps who manufacture the game's weaponry and gear in order to gain the edge they need to surpass their competition. Some corporations do take the role of Evil, Inc. depending on the game (Atlas in Borderlands, Dahl in Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel!, Hyperion in Borderlands 2 and Maliwan in Borderlands 3).
• Master Detective Archives: Rain Code: The Amaterasu Corporation is an extremely shady MegaCorp that was powerful enough to take over Kanai Ward as a whole. The reasoning for this is due to, in the case of all three of its leaders, Yomi Hellsmile and Dr. Huesca trading with outside enterprises and also conducting the homunculus research the UG hired them and provided funding for, and for Makoto Kagutsuchi, the UG was also complicit in giving him his position as the CEO when he blackmailed them about their homunculus research and persuaded them to isolate Kanai Ward than let them flatten the city. Of course, the reason he took the position was to shut down the former two's homunculus research.
• Megadimension Neptunia VII: Discussed and subverted. During the second act the heroes take a moment to discuss the fact that despite being national leaders who control most of the world's surface area and economy, they're still surprised the villains have managed to secure a flying battleship, something that would be beyond any of their national means. Cut to said villains having a Seinfeldian Conversation where their leader with a Money Fetish is grumbling about interest payments. The others are shocked he'd ever take a loan at all, and he points out that no entity could ever afford a floating battleship outright — he bought it on finance.
• Persona 5: The Anti-Social Force conspiracy that the Phantom Thieves find themselves running up against counts many of Japan's movers and shakers among its number, with its ringleader being a wealthy, powerful politician and one of its major backers being one of Japan's Fiction 500. By contrast, the Phantom Thieves are a group of teenagers whose resources are limited to the Metaverse, what they can get from it, as well as favors and assistance from people who Joker has made a bond with.
• Shadow Warrior: Across the series, mercenary for hire Lo Wang is shown facing the MegaCorp Zilla Enterprises (Zilla Zaibatsu in Shadow Warrior 2), owned by the powerful mogul Orochi Zilla, said to own entire cities, including their security forces (and in 2 he has his own Egopolis, Zilla City). It stops being the case in Shadow Warrior 3, as the Evildoing Dragon has consumed half of the world, including Zilla City, with Orochi Zilla himself being left in shambles.

• Clinic of Horrors: Mister Yellow, the Big Bad of the story, is a businessman who owns every single major medical business in contrast to Bianca and Albright who work as ally doctors.

• Codename: Kids Next Door: Father, the series primary Big Bad, is shown to be the CEO of Evil Adult Industries, which is likely how he can afford his various henchmen, war machines and birthday cakes for the Delightful Children, as well as his mansion.
• Family Guy: Lampshaded in the Star Wars parody, which included the Training Montage from Rocky IV.

  Chris as Luke Skywalker: Is it me, or does the Empire have way better facilities?

• Gargoyles: One of Xanatos' strengths (other than his ability to have back-up plan after back-up plan) is his seemingly endless wealth, to the point where he was able to relocate an entire castle and have it installed on top of his skyscraper. While he isn't able to avoid the law if he's caught doing something illegal, Elisa disgustedly notes that he can afford lawyers to get his sentence shortened, assistants like Owen to carry out any plans he makes while in prison, and has the ability to rebuild his reputation with the people via various expensive favors.
• The Powerpuff Girls (1998): Princess Morbucks is a wealthy little girl who wants to be like the Powerpuff Girls...but instead of being a hero to help and protect people like Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup, she only wants to be a hero for the attention and praise. The girls call her out on this, leading her to become a supervillain. She uses her parents' money to buy weapons and tools that mimic superpowers, or even give her temporary ones. While the girls always defeat her and send her to prison for her actions, the fact that she never stays there too long is likely because of this trope.