Mark Wahlberg wants to take on the longevity-startup crowd with an affordable gym concept

Last day to save up to $200 to TechCrunch Founder Summit on Oct. 16. Register now.

Disrupt doors open Oct. 13. Get your pass and bring someone with you at 50% off. REGISTER NOW.

Mark Wahlberg has started companies of his own and backed plenty of others. But the gym he’s opening in December, he says, has him more excited than anything he’s done in his entire career. It also goes after a corner of the market where venture money keeps flowing: pricey, diagnostics-heavy wellness.

Speaking with us at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco on Thursday, the actor said the first Municipal Gym opens in December. It’s a 32,000-square-foot club outside Las Vegas with blood work, epigenetic testing, recovery gear, compression therapy, cold plunges, and a café that serves up protein muffins, among other things. He’s pitching it as the affordable alternative to the longevity clubs that charge tens of thousands of dollars a year for much the same thing.

It’s the second part of a scheme that was, in some ways, first hatched seven years ago, with a casual sportswear line.

The clothing brand Municipal launched during COVID, which Wahlberg volunteers “was not a good idea.” (Clothing was a lousy business to enter in 2020, with retailers from J.Crew to Brooks Brothers going bankrupt.)

It grew out of what he’d been seeing as a celebrity fitness spokesperson. He’d done collabs with various brands, and other companies kept approaching him to be their brand ambassador, but they all seemed to want the same thing, he said. “Everybody just kind of wanted to sell T-shirts and sneakers. And I was like, well, I want to kind of have a bigger impact on people’s lives as a whole.”

By that, he meant what people eat, what supplements they take, how they train, and how they recover. Clothing was just the start. “We figured, okay, we’ll start in the apparel space, and then we’ll build from there.” He says he only takes swings at “things that I’m very passionate about and things that are a direct extension of who I am.”

Even without a pandemic, clothing is a brutal business, as we pointed out, citing Lululemon’s repeated quality-control challenges . But Wahlberg didn’t seem fazed, talking instead about why the gym fits his vision. He thought it “always could be great for the brand” in part because it gives people a place to “actually feel and touch the clothes” before they buy. Besides, he continued, how people exercise is “another big part of people’s lives.”

Most in the space have been laser-focused on the high end. Fountain Life, the longevity company co-founded by Tony Robbins, raised $18 million last year to expand its centers for wealthy clients, and a full subscription runs $21,500 a year, according to reports. The Estate, a company co-founded by Robbins and hospitality executive Sam Nazarian, is still mapping out plans to charge $35,000 memberships to its wellness centers. Equinox is similarly taking names for a $36,000 longevity add-on that it plans to launch atop a traditional gym membership.

Wahlberg says Municipal aims for that same luxury tier but for a lot less.