Motivated by many experimental efforts to develop suitable shape-memory micropumps, we propose a multiscale framework to study the behavior of pressurized films. We use recoverable deflection as a measure to design large stroke micropumps and develop a model to estimate it. We show that the recoverable deflection of a polycrystalline shape-memory film depends on the transformation strain of the underlying martensitic transformation, the texture and especially on the size effects. We find that flat grains are preferable to long grains in columnar films concerning the purpose of large recoverable strain. We also show that common sputtering texture is not ideal for recoverable deflection in both Ti–Ni and Cu-based shape-memory films. It turns out that {100} Cu-based films may have better behavior than Ti–Ni films. We conclude with comparison with experiment.