Origami, the art of paper folding, has recently seen an upsurge of interest due to its use in guiding the design of lightweight deployable structures. Despite the heavy use of thin films in origami designs, comprehensive mechanical understanding lags behind. This is partly because origami structures are often made from new materials for which bulk material properties are not available. In this work, we show how bending can be used to gather broad mechanical information from thin films, and we show how that information can be applied to more complex structures. Explicitly, we use the technique to measure the Young's modulus and monitor the force recovery of polydimethylsiloxane, polystyrene, and polycarbonate films. Our force recovery data are consistent with the sparse published data available but reveal a previously unreported film thickness dependence. We hypothesize that the thickness dependence is related to the strain gradient present in bending.