What is the most overly-complicated villain's plan?

Primer.

 

I'm sure The Doctor has come up with overly complex plans to save the day from time to time, thankfully he usually has a companion or two to bring him to his senses.

 

Season 4 of 24.... Villain kidnaps the Secretary of State and live streams the planned execution... as a diversion to use a device that overrides safety protocols of all nuclear power plants in America so he can cause meltdowns remotely.... which is a diversion to steal a stealth fighter and shoot down Air Force one so they can get the football... to launch one nuclear missile at Los Angeles.

I'm pretty sure every US nuclear power plant melting down > nuking LA.

 

The Count of Monte Cristo might be in the front running. Really, how was Jacapo's idea a bad plan?

 

The movies Die Hard 2/3/4 come to mind.

 

Joker in Dark Knight, really nothing comes close to his level of omnipotence.

Zemo's plan in Civil War wasn't that complex.

 

Some of the season long villain plots in shows like OUAT, The Originals, Arrow, Flash, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., ect. get pretty complicated as a way to fill out the full 20+ episode season. It's not quite as bad now that some of them are doing smaller arcs that only take up part of the season.

 

Bad acid flashbacks to last season, *time remanent*, *killed himself*... argh.

Just like with TVD in the end, I watch it, I enjoy it but I never have a fucking clue what is going on, I'm not even trying to make sense of it anymore.

 

I rewatched the last season of The Originals before the current one started, and I think this is one like Lost that tends to be a lot easier to follow when you don't have a week between episodes.

 

That applies to a lot of 24 seasons. Even first season you think, did they really need that number of spies to kill Jack Bauer, David Palmer and their families?

I haven't seen The Sting but according to Community it required constructing a building and having a thousand people work in perfect secrecy?

 

I was avoiding getting into this since the thread is technically about *other* incidents, but since it's been brought up repeatedly, I'll say it anyway.

Claiming a massive complexity in Zemo's plan is, imo, a complete misreading of what Zemo's plan actually was. Yes, plenty of things happened in the movie that Zemo couldn't reasonably predict, but most of those things were not necessary at all. All that Zemo needed was to 1) sucessfully frame Bucky on the eve of a major superhero control initiative, 2) Gain access to Bucky to discover the location of the Russian base and 3) ensure that both Captain America and Iron Man were aware of Zemo's existence and his potential danger. The fallout between Cap and Tony is then inevitable and most likely to happen in person where Zemo wants (but even then, he can always email Tony that video if he needs to, that just wouldn't make for a great movie). And if they fall the Avengers fall with them. Bucky (or even the others) physically being present or not doesn't really make a difference.

The only part of that which required a major risk was number 2, because he had to trust that his package would disable surveillance long enough for him to put Bucky back under, but it was a calculated risk which, if it went wrong, could easily have been helped by just drawing out the interview, or, if absolutely necessary, pretending to conclude the interview and just walking out the front door before coming up with a new plan.

Yes, all of this requires him to have knowledge of Cap and Stark's personalities - but they're both outright celebrities of the rare breed who actually are genuine in their public appearances, and Zemo is literally an intelligence specialist.

I'm not even sure what you mean by needing to predict how the govt. reacts, since the govt. didn't really react in even the slightest unpredictable way in this story. Everything they did came down to enforcing the law - Bucky was a terrorist suspect, so they went after him. Cap went rogue in relation to the Sokovia accords, so they went after him. There could have been minor variations in the exact manner that these things happened, but I can't think of any that wouldn't ultimately serve Zemo's purpose of discrediting and destroying the Avengers.

 

Keyser Soze.

 

I wouldn't put The Sting into this category (great movie BTW, you really should watch it). Not to give anything away, but the main characters only outfitted a couple of rooms of an existing building, and there were maybe a couple dozen people involved.

 

Ozymandias.

 

And we all love him for it.

 

Death in Final Destination. Any movie.

This is what turned me off to the whole franchise. A group of people is supposed to die at once, but somebody saves them and "foils death's plans," so Death spends the next two hours killing them off one by one with a bunch of overwrought Rube Goldberg devices. It's DEATH. DEATH! Death could take them all out with heart attacks at 3:55 PM EST on the fourth of July during a hailstorm even if they were scattered across the planet. Too much of a coincidence? So what? IT'S DEATH! It's not like the SVU squad is gonna bring him in for murder in the next episode.

Ahhh. I've been waiting to get that off my chest.

 

I forget which one of the Saw movies it was (they all kinda run together after a certain point), but IIRC the kidnapping of a group of strangers, each one who is tortured and killed by rubegoldberg'esque machinery was all to just get one individual to do one thing at the end.

 

I would totally watch that, by the way. Just to see Lt. Benson interrogating Death.

 

LOL--you are expecting way too much from those movies.

 

That reminds me, talking about overly complicated villain plots. The Man In Black from Lost might rate highest of all time in this category. His plot to murder his brother involved like sixty people making the exact choices he expects over sixty years, posing as ten different dead people, time travel and intricately networked predestination paradoxes.