Yes, It Was That Important. Fans Have Raised Thousands of Dollars to Get Rid of the Rat From End of The Departed

Martin Scorsese has a film career that spans 50 years. His skill behind the camera has earned him Oscars, Golden Globes and Emmys, and awards from BAFTA and the Directors Guild and many, many others. That doesn’t stop some guy on the internet from thinking he knows better than the famed director, though.

Director Adam Sacks has launched a Kickstarter campaign to digitally remove the rat from the last scene of Martin Scorsese’s The Departed—a film that earned Scorsese an Oscar for Best Achievement in Directing.

While Sacks considers The Departed “a great Scorsese film,” according to his Kickstarter, he has one quibble with the film’s ending. “Unfortunately, The Departed has one huge problem,” Sacks writes. “The movie ends with the painfully on the nose metaphor of an ACTUAL RAT crawling across screen.”

In the film both Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio play slightly less-furry rats: DiCaprio is a police officer who infiltrates the Boston mob and Damon is a mobster who “rats” from inside the Boston police force. The rodent version is too much for Sacks, who wrote, “It’s always bothered me that a movie as good as The Departed has such a cheesy ending, and I recently realized it could be fixed by digitally erasing the rat from the last shot.”

In the hope of luring funders to help him reach his $4,000 goal, Sacks painstakingly laid out the campaign’s budgetary needs, to ensure complete transparency in the process. That includes, laying out the cost to buy a copy of the film on Blu-Ray, paying an editor to remove the rat, and paying an intern $15 an hour to burn new copies of the “fixed” version of the film to send out to backers of the campaign. After the “fix” is in, Sacks hopes that his new rat-free version of the film will become the official version, claiming the change “will make The Departed a much better movie.”

Of course there are some risks in the project. Namely, that according to Sacks, Warner Bros. owns the copyright to the film and may not appreciate his improvement. He is still going to try though, ensuring would-be backers, “If I don’t receive a cease and desist letter and hit $4,000 it will happen.”

Turns out a lot of movie fans actually agreed with Sacks and his Kickstarter campaign has already surpassed its $4,000 goal, with many days still to go. If you want a sneak peek of the rat-free production, Twitter account Eyes On Cinema shared a clip of the scene sans rat, which it wrote was edited by Mark LaCroix.