Fire spread in polymers is of great importance with products such as textiles and consumer goods, and materials used in construction, aerospace, transportation, bedding, and furniture. In this study, the fire spread rate of multilayered polyethylene/polypropylene (PE/PP) and polystyrene/polypropylene (PS/PP) films was investigated from two perspectives: burning rate and dripping. We discovered a linear relationship between film thickness and burning rate, which suggests the use of volumetric burning rate to negate the effect of film thickness. We discovered that a multilayer configuration provides two significant advantages: a delay in the time to the first drip of up to 400%, and up to 90% reduction in the number of drips compared to the average value for the homopolymers. However, the multilayer structures showed up to an 87% increase in the volumetric burning rate relative to the corresponding homopolymers. Melt processed PE/PP blends showed an intermediate behavior compared to the homopolymers and multilayered structures. In a separate set of experiments, blends containing up to 2% by weight PTFE were characterized by reduced burning rates, however there was not a noticeable change in the first drip time or the number of drips. A hypothesis that elastic retraction plays an important role in reducing dripping was confirmed by studying samples after annealing. Our findings also revealed that interfacial tension plays a determining role in the rate of fire spread. As the interfacial tension between the polymer pairs increased, the first drip time was delayed and the number of drips decreased. This study demonstrates that a multilayer polymer film geometry can yield control over fire spread.