Keenen Ivory Wayans

He'd been working the margins for years, writing bits for Eddie Murphy's Raw and taking whatever parts came. I'm Gonna Git You Sucka changed that: a blaxploitation parody he wrote, directed, and starred in for $3 million that made $13 million and got Fox's attention. In Living Color launched in 1990 and ran as a machine: Jim Carrey's film career effectively started there, Jamie Foxx's too. He walked out in 1992 after Fox started censoring the show and rereleasing episodes without his sign-off. He left at the height of its run. Most people don't get to do that on their own terms.

After Scary Movie 2 in 2001, Keenen mostly stayed out of the director's chair, letting Marlon and Shawn carry the franchise flag. In late 2024 he rejoined his brothers to write and produce Scary Movie 6, the first time the three had collaborated in over 17 years. Filming started in October 2025. The question isn't whether the franchise still has an audience. It does. The question is whether a genre parody can land when the genre has already parodied itself to death.

One semester from a Tuskegee engineering degree, he dropped out to pursue comedy, which is the kind of bet that defines a career or ends it. He grew up the second of ten siblings in Manhattan's Fulton housing projects, and those brothers and sisters became his first audience and eventually his actual cast. The concept for I'm Gonna Git You Sucka reportedly came from Eddie Murphy, who suggested the blaxploitation angle and the title. The Wayans gave him the cast. What Keenen brought was the nerve to take all of it to network television.