8 Really Stupid Plans Comic Book Movie Villains Tried
4. Zemo's Plan Relies On Incredible Luck - Captain America: Civil War
The Plan: Like Lex in BvS, Zemo's plan requires a heavy dosage of luck, and relies on other people acting in a specific way, something he can't directly control.
His main objective is to tear the Avengers apart, in return for them inadvertently killing his family in Sokovia. He'll do this by showing Tony a tape of Bucky killing his parents, turning Iron Man and Captain America (Bucky's BFF) on each other.
Why It's Stupid: To start with, Zemo frames Bucky for the explosion at the UN conference, in the hopes that he'll be captured. But there's no guarantee of that. What if Bucky had simply evaded capture? Zemo's plan dies there and then.
He's also extremely lucky that nobody has seen the face of the real psychologist sent to chat with Bucky, and he can impersonate them without a disguise.
And what if his EMP blast hadn't gone off when he was conducting his interrogation? What if (and this really should've happened) Everett Ross had sent some guards into the room with Zemo? As soon as he began to read the words from the red book, they'd have stopped him immediately.
And if that fragile videotape had been destroyed or damaged in the 20-plus years it'd been lying around, Zemo can't do anything. Plus, Iron Man is only there to view the tape because Falcon divulged Cap's whereabouts... how could Zemo have predicted that?
The basic plan to separate the Avengers is a good one, but the execution contains too many moments of happenstance for a smart man Zemo to really consider it a plausible option.