Neetu and Rishi Kapoor leave the hospital on Thursday. (Below) Katrina Kaif outside the hospital on Wednesday. (PTI)

Dec. 1: Doctors have not said yet how many days Amitabh Bachchan is expected to be confined to bed.

But the showbiz industry ? expecting a minimum 10-day stay in the hospital, followed by at least a month at home ? has started reworking schedules.

The first to feel the impact will be Kaun Banega Crorepati 2. The STAR Plus show will go off the air from December 23.

Says Deepak Segal, executive vice-president, content, STAR India: “Our episode bank will run out and we’ll have to take KBC off or maybe telecast old episodes in the 9 pm slot from Friday to Sunday. The show can return once Mr Bachchan is fit. More than the show, it’s important for us that he comes back.”

Once the 85-episode contract with Bachchan is over ? the first episode since his hospitalisation goes on air tomorrow at 9 pm ? STAR also has plans to produce a stipulated number of KBC shows every season.

The high-profile quizmaster had agreed to a KBC 3, too. “Let STAR come with the fresh contract next year and we can look into it,” Bachchan had told The Telegraph last week. That, of course, will have to wait a while.

If the country’s general knowledge classes will take a break, the busy winter schedules of brand endorsements will also be frozen. Boro Plus, Dabur Chyawanprash, Reid & Taylor and Cadbury are some of the brands endorsed by Bachchan.

“Fresh advertisements are usually shot just at the onset of the winter months. These products may have to do without new commercials. His other brands like Pepsi, which have summer campaigns, need not worry,” says ad guru Prahlad Kakkar.

Ironically, it’s the big screen projects that would suffer the least, thanks to Bachchan’s start-to-finish project scheduling. “In recent months, he had adopted this strategy of finishing one film and only then starting another,” said a source associated with AB Corp, Bachchan’s production company.

His next three releases ? Apoorva Lakhia’s Ek Ajnabee, Raj Kumar Santoshi’s Family and Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s Eklavya ? do not require any more dates from Bachchan. But his star presence will be missed at the promotionals.

The two big scheduling upsets would be Ravi Chopra’s Babul and Karan Johar’s Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna. Babul, co-starring Salman Khan, Rani Mukherjee and John Abraham, was slated to start from December 10. The New York leg of Johar’s magnum opus, co-starring a host of stars led by Shahrukh Khan and Abhishek, has been shot, but Bachchan needs to shoot for a few more days.