Idea

I was looking at my cage and the multiple layers stacked on top of each other, and it reminded me of different movies/TV shows:

• Ready Player One (stacks/slums protagonist grew up in)
• Snowpiercer (back of the train = poor, front = rich)
• Black Mirror (15 Million Merits)
• 3% (rich control poor by testing and pitting people against each other in various tests/competitions)
• Matrix (self-actualization and escape from control => free your mind)
• One Piece (Pirate King, treasure, dreams)
• Yu-Gi-Oh (Battle City)

Themes

• Freedom from Capitalism through self-actualization (bank and government control)
• Behavioral Sink
• Wealth Inequality - Upper class vs Lower class (Parasite)
• Corporate Control - data collection and AI algorithm predictions (Total Recall)
• Population Control (What Happened to Monday)
• Animal/Human Cruelty (Okja)

Characters

Protagonist (hacker alias: ZER0)

Premise

I'll take my original idea for a Web3 hacker waking up late one day to meet his gf (soon to be ex gf because of their opposing belief systems - red vs blue pill), and write them as rats instead.

Every rat will have a personality that is extreme with no in-between (either fully blue pill or fully red). There are three main groups of rats within this one stack. Throughout the whole movie, make it seem like this one giant stack of cages is the entire world within this setting, but add in a twist at the end: the rat utopia is just one stack in a huge farm of stacks, like in The Matrix when Neo first unplugs and wakes up.

So even if the protagonist completely (barely, with a 0.001% chance) overcomes the main antagonist/corporation/oligarchs in the movie, at the end he realizes this is only the beginning and there are vast simulations going on. (future twists could be that the stacks are tiny buildings created by thousands of rat generations living under NYC, where humans are also being controlled this way - human/rat psychological behavior)