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“Friday” movie series actor Mike Epps and other Indianapolis celebrities will have opportunities with actor and comedian Kevin Hart’s entertainment production company as it starts planning for the WNBA All-Star 2025 events in Indy.
Pacers Sports & Entertainment last week announced it has tapped Hart’s Hartbeat entertainment company as the official “cultural curator” to provide entertainment and live experiences for fans and the Indianapolis community. The comedian and actor will be front and center at WNBA All-Star 2025 with the Indiana Fever hosting July 18-19.
Hartbeat and the Pacers organization are producing a music and comedy festival as part of the festivities.
Hart said Los Angeles, California-based Hartbeat plans to use the deal with the Pacers to develop services to pitch to other sports organizations.
“It’s an opportunity for our company. Our company is a creative engine for any resource that allows us to be,” President and CEO Hart said during a Friday appearance on “The Breakfast Club” radio show. “The Pacers, we’ll use as an example. Once we do it well and from that example, I’ll go to other f**king NBA teams, or the NBA in general, and be like, ‘I’m looking to be a better partner for the NBA. How do we better tell stories for your brand? How do we better promote and market you? How can we amplify or activate differently?’ These are words in the business that companies desperately want to hear from potential partners.”
Hart’s “The Breakfast Club” appearance came days after Epps was on the show and discussed Hartbeat being selected to lead entertainment for the Indiana Pacers and Indiana Fever.
Epps, an Indy native and Pacers fan known to promote Indiana in his work, was high profile during the 2025 NBA All-Star Weekend when Indianapolis hosted.
He and Hart had a long adversarial relationship, but he told “The Breakfast Club” he didn’t feel slighted when the Pacers enlisted Hart’s company to come into town and take over the teams’ entertainment activities.
“It’s politics. And a lot of times, people that are not in a business like comedy or people who are not in the rap game, that run entities, they don’t know,” Epps said. “They think me and Kevin are sitting in the backyard drinking iced tea together. So you really can’t get upset about it.”
“It’s enough for everybody,” he said. “Kevin has put on enough young comics and people, so I didn’t get slighted about that.”
Kevin Hart’s Hartbeat entertainment plans in Indiana
The Pacers and Fever experiences will include stand-up comedy, musical acts, half-time shows, festivals and merchandise collaborations at Gainbridge Fieldhouse and throughout the Indianapolis area.
Hartbeat’s projects include Hart’s sports talk series “Cold as Balls” and “Shaquille O’Neal’s All-Star Comedy Jam” at various large sporting events, as well as ESPN’s “NBA Unplugged with Kevin Hart.”
Hart stressed that the company will run the show in Indy, not him as a Philly-raised 76ers or Eagles fan.
“It’s not a Kevin Hart thing. Everybody assumes that Kevin Hart is the driving factor or the source. It’s the entity. The entity has to do things outside of me for an entity to f**king thrive. That’s a fact, whether it’s the f**king Pacers, I got business with the Falcons, I got business with the Eagles.”
“Our business thrives when we can implement ourselves in places to create or elevate a brand, a company, an entity, an activation, whether it be live entertainment, storytelling, et cetera.”
Entertainment opportunities at WNBA All-Star 2025
Will Hartbeat reach out to Epps for WNBA All-Star?
“Absolutely!” Hart told show hosts.
“If All-Star weekend is coming up there and we’re like, ‘Okay, hey, we have ideas to service a bigger process that people can probably gravitate towards a little different from what they’ve done in the past. Here’s how we’re gonna make the All-Star weekend in Indiana, when the women are playing, here’s how we can make it different,’” he said.
Programming might include roundtable discussions as well as comedy activations, he said.
“Does Mike want to bring in and be responsible for comedy from Indiana? Absolutely. That’s when you tap in. All (we at Hartbeat) are is the servicing hub. We’re the hub. Now it’s our job to go and grab everybody to make this thing underneath our hub better. You desperately need that.“
“So in this case, ‘Hell yeah, Mike, come on! Mike, by the way, this is your city. What’s dope about the city that we can do with you? What do you want to do? How do we help you?’ That’s partnership.”
The call hasn’t gone out yet because the deal is fresh, Hart said Friday.
“It literally just happened. We just did the deal,” he said. “Now you’ve got to tap in to the culture of the city. You’ve got to tap into popular names and faces from the city. You gotta tap into the athletes that are the stars in the city. Now you go and you say, ‘Guys, here’s what we’re thinking of. Here’s how we make this special. Here’s how we do it with you. Is this a collaborative thing that makes sense for you?’ ‘If so, great. If not, well, what does?’”
What was the Mike Epps-Kevin Hart feud about?
Epps and Hart had a long, contentious relationship that began in 2014 when Epps called Hart overrated.
After years of back-and-forth insults online, the comedians ended their beef in 2023.
Epps said he was disappointed that Hart didn’t contact him when he visited Indianapolis. The Pacers announcement was accompanied by a photo of Hart touring Gainbridge Fieldhouse in November 2024.
Now the two are discussing collaborating on film or television projects.
“Me and Mike’s relationship now, we’re 10 times better. It took a long time to get to where we are now, but I’m happy about the road of dumb s***, because it got us to a place of real grown man s***,” Hart said. “A lot of the disconnect was from assumption, and that’s the realization that came about. But I have no ill will, no beef towards anybody, damn sure not Mike.”
“Right now, the priority between me and Mike is figuring out the thing that we’re going to do together,” he said. “And I think now having that as a priority, his fans will be happy, my fans I think, will be happy; and I think it’d be dope for the culture when we do it.”
Contact IndyStar reporter Cheryl V. Jackson at cheryl.jackson@indystar.com or 317-444-6264. Follow her on X:@cherylvjackson, or Bluesky: @cherylvjackson.bsky.social.