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

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. “We have a better price point than our competitors, and we’re going to get far more results,” he said. For $99, he said as an example, members will receive three rounds of blood work and an hour with a doctor to flag what they’re predisposed to. Supplements and hormone therapy are also “right there.”

When we asked whether the gyms double as storefronts for his other products (he owns a supplements brand), he said “kind of.” What he’s really building, he said, is a “health and wellness ecosystem” with “everything there, soup to nuts.”

He didn’t put a number on how many gyms he wants, but he called the growth strategy “aggressive,” telling us that “landlords and developers who toured the Las Vegas site have offered “AAA locations at very favorable terms, with great TI” (tenant-improvement allowances that help pay for the build-out).

Wahlberg’s record in fitness might scare off someone else. We told him we’d recently watched “Wahl Street,” his reality show, in which an early episode shows him getting deeply involved with the fitness chain F45 in 2019, and that we wanted to warn him about what was coming. “How did you know about the pandemic?” he joked, to laughs from the crowd. He bought into the company, known for its 45-minute classes, at a $450 million valuation. It went public in 2021, then was delisted from the NYSE in 2023 after its stock collapsed. Wahlberg said he learned a lot from the experience.

“I think the biggest takeaway was just making sure that I’m involved with people that share the same approach that I do.” He also said he always thought big box was the better model. F45’s classes suit people who are short on time, but he wants members to hang around Municipal for hours. Plenty of gyms run on a “join up but don’t show up” model, he said, adding: “I can’t understand that philosophy.”

The name Municipal is very intentional and clearly means a lot to Wahlberg, who grew up poor in Boston, one of nine kids, playing on public basketball courts and golf courses. “You learn a lot on the blacktop,” he said. “You learn to win, to lose, to compete, and hopefully to get back up and do it again.”

He has never hidden his rough youth. (He was sentenced to two years for assaults as a teenager and served 45 days.)

In fact, earlier in the afternoon on Thursday, surrounded by friends and business associates in a seating area backstage — this is the man who inspired the show “Entourage” after all — he said he was turned around by two people, including Father Jim Flavin, a Boston-area parish priest who has been in Wahlberg’s life since he was 13.

He wants the gyms to carry that same spirit. “It’s a place to work, but have fun and support each other and create community and really challenge people to be better versions of themselves,” he said. It’s personal, he said outright. “I’ve come from next to nothing to being in an amazing position,” Wahlberg said. “I try to constantly remind myself that I can inspire other people growing up in similar situations, especially inner-city kids and at-risk youth, that there is a way to overcome your circumstances if you’re willing to go out there and do the work.”

At 55, he added, his goals have changed; while he was once focused on looking good, “I just want to feel good when I wake up in the morning,” he said. “I want to be able to conquer all the things that I have planned for the day.”

He also said his plate is exceedingly full right now, between the gym, a film role as Pete Rose, and his daughter’s equestrian career. He’s so eager for the gym to open, he said, that visiting the construction site feels like “literally watching paint dry.” Indeed, asked if he was open to taking on new ventures, he shrugged. “I’m not out there hunting, looking for the next thing for sure.” But he wouldn’t rule it out, he added quickly. “If something amazing were to come along, obviously I wouldn’t turn it down.”