America’s Got Talent judge Howie Mandel had a front-row seat to a fireball in a Los Angeles grocery store parking lot Friday — and somehow walked away looking like the star of his own action movie.
Cellphone video shot by his daughter, Jackelyn Shultz, shows the 70-year-old comedian standing just yards from a parked car already fully engulfed in flames outside a Food4Less. Thick black smoke pours into a clear sky as Mandel, bald head shining and round sunglasses on, films the blaze on his phone.
He’s dressed for the occasion in blue denim overalls with one strap dangling, a black Busch Light Clash T-shirt, and a canned beverage in his free hand. A shopping cart sits nearby and a few other people mill around the lot as the fire rages.
Then comes the warning.
“Dad, it could explode,” Shultz can be heard saying. In another version of the clip circulating online she adds, “if there’s gas in it.”Mandel starts to turn. Seconds later, the car erupts. A bright orange fireball rolls upward and the smoke thickens dramatically as he continues walking away, can still in hand, glancing back at the camera like he just finished a take.
Both Mandel and his daughter walked away unharmed, according to early reports. Shultz posted the footage to her TikTok account, where it quickly spread to X and racked up millions of views.
One widely shared still from the moment captures Mandel facing the lens with the inferno roaring behind him. Social media users immediately called it the accidental movie poster of the year.“
Howie Mandel’s daughter was filming him next to a burning car and said ‘Dad, it could explode.’ He turns around, it f—king explodes, and somehow they accidentally made the hardest movie poster of 2026,” one X user wrote. Others joked that the germaphobe who famously avoids handshakes had no problem standing feet from a potential gas-tank blast, and that the one-strap overalls only added to the chaos.No official cause for the fire has been released, and it is unclear how the car ignited or whether anyone else was injured. The clip simply shows Mandel and his daughter documenting the scene before the sudden flare-up sent them packing.
Mandel, the longtime “Deal or No Deal” host who co-hosts the podcast “Howie Mandel Does Stuff” with Shultz, has not publicly commented. For now, the internet is treating the close call as the most cinematic thing to happen in an L.A. parking lot all week.
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