Trailer: John Travolta behind the Kennedy assassination?

After presenting his first film as a director at Cannes, John Travolta returns to the camera to November 1963a historical thriller that revisits the assassination of John F. Kennedy through a theory involving the Chicago Mafia.

What if his murder had been sponsored by the Outfit? This is the bias of November 1963the trailer for which has just been revealed (below), with John Travolta in the role of mobster John Roselli, aka “Handsome Johnny”.

The film takes place over 48 hours, around the assassination of the American president on November 22, 1963, and intends to tell the events from the point of view of the Chicago Outfit rather than that of the official version.

The trailer presents a mafia organization which allegedly helped elect Kennedy to the White House, in exchange for the promise that the federal justice system would stop being interested in his criminal activities. But when this agreement fell apart, the Chicago Outfit decided to organize a terrible revenge.

The plot would then lead to Lee Harvey Oswald, presented in the film as the executioner of the plan in Dallas. After the assassination, the mafia must face panic and a gigantic manhunt, while seeking to limit the consequences of what it has just caused.

John Travolta therefore plays John Roselli, an important member of the Chicago mafia who also allegedly participated in the plan to assassinate Fidel Castro, in connection with the CIA. Opposite him, Robert Carlyle plays Jack Ruby, the nightclub owner who shoots Oswald two days after the Kennedy assassination.

The cast also brings together Dermot Mulroney as Chuckie Nicoletti, Mandy Patinkin as Anthony Accardo, Jefferson White as Lee Harvey Oswald and Thomas Fiscella as Sam Giancana.

In the direction, we find Roland Joffé, the filmmaker of Assignment (1986) and The City of Joy (1992). Above all, the screenplay is by Nicholas Celozzi, who also produces the film. He is none other than the great-nephew of the famous godfather of the Chicago mafia, Sam Giancana, at the helm of the Outfit in the 1960s. According to his statements to PeopleCelozzi claims to have received this story from his great-uncle over the years: “What I wrote is what (Pepe) saw, the story of how and why the Outfit made the decision to assassinate the president…“Giancana was shot multiple times in the head just before testifying before a U.S. Senate committee in 1975.

The film therefore clearly adopts this theory as a fictional starting point, without claiming to officially rewrite the history of the Kennedy assassination.

November 1963 will be released in theaters in the United States on November 20, 2026, two days before the 63rd anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. No date yet in France.