I don't think it is abject arrogance. It is the free market telling them that $15 tickets are OK. So it is reasonable for them to try $20 tickets. If that does not work, they will be told so quickly by the ticket sales. If it does work, the prices will adjust upward. If it does not work and they still adjust prices upward they will be punished with lower profits in the next few quarters.
Remember, the arrogance you see from Hollywood types is largely because they are smarter than us and know how to run our lives better than we benighted types. But when it comes to money, they are still students of the free market they profess to despise. They will use the free market to make a lot of money because building concentration camps costs a lot, doncha know.
But really, it's NOT good for them to do this --- I predict that most of the American public will agree that only very very very few select movies are worth $20 to view on the big screen.
Hollywood will have a hard time in attempting to entice back the large numbers of casual movie goers who'll simply not 'bite.' LOL
And plenty of people will simply stop following movie reviews because they have NO itention of paying that type of ticket price.
Promoting ILL WILL during a major recession is a stupid business move. But noone ever claimed that Hollyweird was particularly enamored with the public, LOL