“The Big Cigar” had a long journey to the screen. It was first set up at Sony in 2012 as a film adaptation of a Playboy article by journalist Joshuah Berman, who had previously written the article that became “Argo,” a film that made $230 million and won the Academy Award for Best Picture. “The Big Cigar,” with its ‘70s setting, stranger-than-fiction story and political thriller plot, was obviously intended to be the next “Argo.”
But the business has changed, and there aren’t a lot of movies like “Argo” anymore. Those kinds of stories are now more likely to be turned into limited series, often for streaming services that didn’t exist in 2012.