either completely successful or utterly disastrous:
a make-or-break marketing policy.
Origin
1915-20
Idioms and Phrases with make or break
make or break
Cause either total success or total ruin, as in This assignment will make or break her as a reporter. This rhyming expression, first recorded in Charles Dickens's Barnaby Rudge (1840), has largely replaced the much older (16th-century) alliterative synonym make or mar, at least in America.